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DID YOU KNOW THE FUNNIEST FROG IN THE WORLD?

I want to write something about Frog.
Not Frogs, plural, but Frog, singular.

Everyone who has passed through Eugene, Oregon, and spent more than a cursory amount of time there knew Frog in the way that you know any colorful local of a town.
In my hometown, it was a man who wore a dashiki, would walk to the river to blow his horn for a while, then walk back to wherever he lived. I think his name was Gabriel, but that could be me fitting an appropriate name to a situation.

I knew Frog before I ever really interacted with him because he was always at farmers' markets and artisans' markets.

As a child and even into my teen years, my parents would drag me two to four hours away for some activity. In this case, the markets mentioned above. It was hard to miss Frog. He would wheel a wagon around the place, asking loudly, "HAVE YOU SEEN THE WORLD'S FUNNIEST JOKE BOOK?"
He would also squeeze a rubber chicken or let you squeeze it so it made noise.

I should also mention that most of the jokes are typed copy/pastes that were zined together. In one of the books I have, some are just emails he got from friends, vertically slapped into the pagination. Most of the jokes were chuckle-inducing, and only some were very, very funny.

When I attended the University of Oregon, I would pass him every day on my way to lunch. This was my favorite part of the day, especially when I lived off campus. I had a great routine: classes, a long lunch, comic book or used book buying, finish classes, take the long bus loop home, and stop at the Valley River Center. (You can see this mall as the centerpiece of an underlooked comedy with the BETTER Saturday Night Live cast members if you find How to Beat the High Cost of Living.)
Every day, almost without fail, he would be at his specific spot on the corner, asking, "HAVE YOU SEEN THE WORLD'S FUNNIEST JOKE BOOK?"

So, of course, having time one day as I had a late class, I stopped and bought a few of his books. Squeezed the rubber chicken. Went on my way to one of my favorite restaurants, "East Meets West," owned by two women who were clearly best friends. One was Chinese, and the other was the ur-example of a white lady who owns a diner.

The menu wasn't fusion, but you could order from the eastern or western sides of the menu. Perhaps I have a soft spot for the place, now long closed, perhaps because I was one of the first customers on my way to the Smith Family Bookstore to dig through conspiracy and new age literature for something that wasn't just new age nonsense.

A few weeks after that, after reading from the book Frog Gets High (the other I bought was of the time, and therefore called Frog Goes to Abu Ghraib), I was out in the woods with friends, having partaken of a mysterious something. I will leave it to you to deduce what.
Came the time that nature called, and heading into the bushes, I relieved myself. In the process of removing the urine from my system, I heard a sizzling in the air, and rising up from the ground I seemed to see a small cartoon frog waving, while piss-yellow electric words danced around, saying, "BROUGHT TO YOU BY FROG."
I can't explain it in a rational way, but I have suspicions about what happened.

So why bring this up now?
Well, due to the news that Frog has passed from this Earth breaking late last night.

This was a person that was a fixture, a person that has been doing one weird thing and making a living at it for longer than I've been alive. And a person that did what they loved: selling the worst/best joke books the world has ever known. He even went to court to assert his right to sell these joke books.

I started today worried about how my classes would go, but two things happened during them. In the first class, a bird flew inside, and try though I might, I could not get it to leave. It hopped around, pecked at one of those blue plastic desks you remember from your still-in-school nightmares, and kept bonking into windows that were not the way out.
In the next class, a student who I suspect had been vaping threw up. Not funny funny, but added onto the oddness of the day. The ruder kids found it funny, but most of the students tried to get that student the help they needed in fixing the issue in the room. Despite the pretend cynicism, I saw the kindness the students want to display shine through.

Humans like to make connections even when there is no relation. So I will knowingly do that here, just as I did with whatever happened in the woods that night a few weeks after reading the joke book: I am going to assume that was the expanding feeling that Frog brought to everyone—that what the world really does need is weirdness and humor.
I know I can't take it seriously when my problem is "bird won't leave class."

Thanks, Frog.

Thoughts from the Lily Pond:
Rest in Peace, Frog
Beloved Eugene jokebook author ‘Frog’ dies at 76, close friend says
Well-known Eugene jokebook author and local character ‘Frog’ has left this mortal coil