I am comforted by Mozart's ridiculous laugh.

If we've ever met you know I have what's been always referred to as "the laugh". There's no way you didn't notice it and you probably asked someone who knows me better about it, or even had the courage or diplomacy or tactlessness to ask me directly. I probably said that I wasn't sure, the laugh was just something I did, and I sighed or showed some discomfort or ire at being reminded to get you to stop asking.

And though it's been there as far back as anyone can recall, the laugh has managed to defy too much scrutiny or explanation. After the first couple decades of my life I just accepted it and tried not to think too much about it.

It just is.

But recently someone classified the laugh as "a powerful force".

Given the past, I'd never considered it as such. For all the teasing, imitations, belittlement, and mockery throughout the years to this night from an attribute I don't even hear. When I speak it slips in undetected, slithering into the space after sentences to become my aural earmark and verbal signature.

Teachers accused me of speech impediment, sympathetic classmates wrote it off as a "nervous" laugh, but those conclusions were never right.
And since I'm unaware of it perhaps there's a cognitive reason, a loop or neural detour whereby to finish certain statements it must process with the laugh as its punctuation.

Many times the laugh's been a social litmus test with the immature, unintelligent, bullying, shallow, and asinine who cannot see past such an eccentricity, quickly weeding themselves out of my social circle. Others have even liked me all the more for it, that the oddity is charming in the way you like a six-toed cat or a dog with one folded ear, an irregularity to be accepted as part of the whole -- a thing winning but aberrant, and somehow still seeming wrong.

I had to hear myself on tape when I was 12 to finally catch the laugh, and when I did at the time I found it no wonder some thought me a freak.

There are far worse burdens in this world than an involuntary laugh. In the other direction, many ladies have said that it should be recorded and sold as a foley at great profit.

Yet to come to know my laughter a force, this subconscious exhalation of breath that I gift those about me with, there's a mystery inside that, and yes, a power within that is solely mine to own. It accents near everything I say, colouring my meanings with humour or joy or irony or celebration, an amplification of statement that no one else I've ever met possesses.

Myriads everyday pay for piercings or tattoos to make themselves feel special. I have my laugh, unremovable and uncoverable. It is a force I'll fucking bludgeon you with, the truncheon that'll grind salted injury into the insult. Or better, I can touch you with it, a caress after words that will be all the more significant because they were delivered with laughter.

I am Guillermo, the laughing boy, and that laugh you hear is mine.

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Addenda from 10/17/2013 at 2:10am

... and then Lil' Miss actually said, "Oh Mr. G, your miraculous laugh alone could cure HIV, restart the Federal Government, and end world hunger, all at the same time!"


Yes, really. So blushworthy, so measurelessly sweet, it makes me want to make out with her forever.

While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.