Hell of a Book

by Jason Mott

He looks to be about the same age as I am—leaving the decadent comfort of thirty and reluctantly knocking on the grizzled front door of forty.

And not just any jokes, but those bad kind of jokes that only the very young and only the very Dad are able to laugh about. Those jokes where the punch line is the thing that makes you grimace more than it’s the thing that makes you laugh but the bottom line is that you came here to grimace or laugh to begin with. And I’ve always found that those types of jokes aren’t really about the joke itself but about the willingness to embarrass yourself for the sake of the other person. You know the joke is bad. They know the joke is bad.

It was a wonderful place. It was somewhere. And for a kid from nowhere, that was everything.