It's Ironic, Isn't it? (Cigar Smoke 8-12-10)

Do you know what the word irony means? Oh, sure, you think you know what it means. Hey, I thought I knew what it meant. But try saying just exactly what irony means in one short sentence so that even someone like me who has a two-digit IQ can understand. OK, I’m waiting. I’m not hearing any short sentences. I don’t have all day here, folks, I’m writing a damn column.

You can’t do it, can you? You know what it means, but you can’t actually say what it means. I feel your frustrated, pissy little pain. Well, I am going to quell that pain (and your thirst, if quell shouldn’t be used with pain) and tell you what the dictionary says.

As per the Encarta World Dictionary found on my word processor, irony is “something that happens that is incongruous with what might be expected to happen, especially when this seems absurd or laughable.”

Hey, that is exactly right. Those dictionary guys are pretty happening, huh? That is exactly what I wanted to say, but I couldn’t. And because I know you couldn’t either (you’re probably still stuck on incongruous), I have decided to do yet another public service and help you semi-lowlife ingrates out with an example of irony, which hopefully will stick in your minds. So in the future, if someone asks you what irony is, you can say that you knew this jerk-off columnist guy and you can tell them a little story filled with irony and little else.

As you may recall, I informed you in my last column that I had accidentally backed up into another car. Well, in this week’s column, I am going to inform you that I have backed up into a boat. No, I wasn’t in a car when I hit the boat. I was in a boat when I backed up into the other boat. And why did I back up into another boat? Well, I did it just so I could help you remember what irony is. That’s the kind of guy I am. Selfless.

Altruistic. And a vocabulary-enchancing giant.

Here’s the deal. I bought an old boat to go with my hovel up in Oregon, and the boat needed, shall we say, a boatload of repairs. The motor wouldn’t run, the batteries were dead and there was no reverse gear. And I needed to have a kicker motor mounted, too, for safety reasons. As in, if you are out on the open seas and your first psycho motor goes out you can use your kicker to get your sorry ass back in to land to be able to watch future episodes of “Mad Men.”

So I had the work done. (That noise you hear is my wallet weeping.) Everything is supposedly cool, so a friend of mine and I decide to take her out for a little test cruise. And because I was interested in you learning the meaning of irony, we thought it would be safer if we just used the kicker motor and stayed in the harbor before we headed out to sea and probable death.

The kicker motor started up on the second pull. Mike was at the tiller and I shoved the boat out from the slip, hopped on board like Errol Flynn and we were off. Mike puts the outboard in first gear and off we go. Until he tried to turn the outboard, and he discovered the boat guys had not mounted the outboard motor correctly. And he couldn’t turn.

So he yelled, “Start the main motor and get us out of here!” I jumped into the captain’s seat, turned the motor on and immediately threw it into gear. I floored that sucker. It really took off. Kind of too bad it was in reverse.

So, in two days, I had backed into a car and a boat. (Don’t take me to an airport.) Mike inquired as to just what my reasoning was to have put it into reverse. I told him that my Pasadena Weekly readers were the most important things to me, and that I needed to show them what irony meant with some concrete example that they could use in the future, and that my personal safety, credibility, pride and being referred to as a dangerous, dumber-than-a-donut-hole driver were just not that important to me.

If I wouldn’t have tried to be safe and prudently decided to just take the boat out into the harbor instead of risk going out to sea, and if I hadn’t spent $479 to fix that frigging reverse gear, I would not have been able to use that frigging reverse gear to slam it into frigging reverse and back into that boat with expensively paid-for full reverseness.

Ironic, isn’t it?