My left armpit always sweats a lot more than my right. Like any discerning child of the information age, I did a webMD search to see if my problem was fatal, or would require surgery. A search for “left armpit sweats more than right” only pulled up one result. I’m sorry to say, I have breast cancer.

I’m not going to make a bunch of cancer jokes, though, because the the Brown Cap’n already developed a whole stand-up routine about the time that his mom got cancer and he had to go home and help his dad take care of her. It involved a lot of “Your momma’s so poor…” jokes. So, you know, it’s bad form to bite off someone else’s schtick. One time, before the Great Silence of 2002-2004, when Worker #3116 and the Brown Cap’n were on Unspeaking Terms, and programmed to physically annihilate each other should they come face-to-face, I was visiting the Brown Cap’n at his parents’ house. While Brown Cap’n Sr. and Mrs. Brown Cap’n Sr. (aka Cancer Mom) slept upstairs, the Brown Cap’n took me down to the rumpus room and showed me a video of his “stand-up comedy party”. I call it a video, but it was taped with, like, a walkman that someone had glued a lens onto, down in a darkened basement, so you couldn’t actually see anything, just the sound worked, kinda. The idea behind a “stand-up comedy” party was that everyone was supposed to create and develop their own five to ten-minute stand-up routine, which they would then perform before a live basement audience. Originally, of course, the Brown Cap’n had planned on holding the party somewhere with a brick wall, but that never panned out. Anyhow, while we “listened” to his video on TV, the Brown Cap’n explained how before he performed his routine he was really nervous, so he drank a fifth of vodka, two beers, and took four diet pills. The next day was his first day on the job working as a temporary employee for the United States Postal Service. He was scheduled to work at 11 AM, but was so completely trashed when he woke up, that he didn’t get out of bed until 1 PM. Then his car wouldn’t start, and the bus wasn’t running. But he decided that it would be better if he got some fresh air anyway, so he walked. Slowly. It took him almost an hour. But before he got there, he decided he needed some food, so he went into a party store and bought a Big Grab bag of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, which he ate behind a dumpster in the parking lot of a dollar store. He hadn’t changed clothes from the night before (slept in them, also), so there was still vomit on his shirt, jeans, and shoes. Finally, he got to the USPS, almost four hours late, on his first day, with Flamin’ Hot Cheetos dust all over his mouth, and vomit on his clothing. At which point he was sent out to deliver mail.

It is stories like these that quickly ended the Great Silence in the summer of 2004. Stories like these, drawings of Jesus masturbating through the nail hole in his hand, and some of the finest jokes about your mom having cancer that anyone has ever heard on a television that for all purposes didn’t seem to be working. Seriously, the video quality was shit.