In the 7th and 8th grade, my friends Jon, Ian, and I spent nearly every day of every class trying to get each other into trouble by making each other laugh out loud. Every day. And every day, one of us would crack up loudly and draw the attention of the class, receiving a stern look or some verbal reprimand by the teacher, reminding us us that school was serious business, and that laughter was something shameful and inappropriate.



Much of the laught-out-loud humor between us stemmed from the critter you see staring at you in this post. My friends and I spent our class-time drawing that thing in all sorts of situations that invariably resulted in the creature's death, sometimes by impalement, sometimes by crushing, sometimes by flame... it was sort of a home-grown middle school version of Mr. Bill, but I'm sure that none of us were familiar with the Saturday Night Live sketch. This thing was original.



That thing with the bulbous eyes, the floppy and toothy mouth-flap, and nose-slit nostrils is an ickle. Of the three of us, I'm not sure who created it, but we all agreed that it was intellectually deficient, and could only serve to amuse us if we abused it in as many ways possible. For two years, the ickle was comedy gold, treating us to new reasons for laughter every day... but it was secret laughter. We liked keeping the ickle a secret from everybody, knowing that other people just wouldn't understand. While the ickle would make us laugh juice out of our noses (well, Ian's nose, anyway), other people looked at the drawings with blank stares, clueless why we found our own drawings so funny. I think we enjoyed our elitist flavor of humor.



I couldn't think of a more appropriate image to use for my site's logo. For me, it's a beacon of humor, and of friendship, and a reminder that we all survived the two angst-filled years of middle school.