The Best Puns are Accidental

For those of you privileged not to know me, I am. Many wish I was not, but fie on them, I will continue to be until I can't. You're welcome, and hello.

Normally I like nothing more than to get on up into your eyeballs and holler about the rapid decay of all things, but given how self-evident that whole has become I thought I'd share something nice instead: My greatest accidental pun.

I love puns. They are a crucial part of active listening, making puns about what your conversational partner is saying is the best way to show you're paying attention without making it about you. It interjects levity into formal affairs, clears the skin, lifts difficult stains off of counter-tops, and invigorates the enthinkulation lobe of the meatbrain.

People who don't like puns simply don't like the art of conversation. They are crankity, antisocial brutes who plow through human interaction like a runaway dumptruck full of horse assholes, treating conversation as a direct path between their mouths and whatever they want. There is no romance in these people, no joy in the unexpected, just a ceaseless throbbing demand that you sterilize your outputs for maximum convenience. These are the same ones who, when presented with cake, would choose to sneer and knock the plate from your hands, rather than enjoy a shared treat.

I did not always feel this way. It seems impossible, but I too was once an uptight cake-slapping dork with stupid ideas who considered puns beneath me. I was living with an artist in one of those white collar cities whose urban center was little more than a fight club of glass boxes utterly devoid of life. The only weekend attraction was watching tumbleweeds roll past restaurants we couldn't afford.

We shared a single room in the dusty basement of an abandoned medical museum, it was cozy. There was no running water and we stole electricity from a streetlight. At night the Artist would recite Beowulf in the nude while I would cut the penises out of medical textbooks and hide them in specimen jars. Before streaming media, that was just what you did to have fun.

We were walking to a greasy spoon diner the morning after a particularly raucous all-night game of Baron Munchausen, when I spied a flock of geese alighting in the swampy overflow of a retaining pond. I was dressed like a vaudeville dandy (for Secret Reasons), when I gestured to the birds with the tip of my BUDK Viking Power Tactical Sword-Cane.

"You know, I ate Canadian goose once," I lied "whilst serving in the French Foreign Legion." That part was honest, as a teenager I had a summer job with the Legion waxing all their mustaches.

"Did you now?" My partner mused, gazing at the birds. "And, pray tell, what did they taste like?" They traced a piece of crimson silk idly through their fingers.

Having never actually sampled goose, I settled on the first two random adjectives that sprang to mind, "game-y and fowl."

In response, my beloved muse turned to face me, squared up, and pushed me into the lake.