Is My Sense of Humor Going to Put Me in Prison?

Dir: Joanna Angel
Rating: 9
BurningAngel.com

It dawned on me yesterday just how easily I could be framed for killing my wife and how no one could save me from my own stupidity because I don't have the kind of money required to retain a good lawyer. For the record, I'm madly in love with my wife and have never once thought of offing her. By the same token, I have a very dark and offputting sense of humor (which most VICE readers seem to miss each month), and a lot of what I say can be taken the wrong way. For instance, last week, my wife's high school girlfriend texted me asking for photos from her birthday party. I told her that all the photos were in my wife's phone and my wife was away at sea.

"At sea???" she wrote. I replied, "She's swimming with the fishes." The very moment I hit send I panicked and worried that the girlfriend would not see the humor in my words. I quickly texted her "HA!" to diffuse any worry. She did not respond, although I could see that she had read the text. I followed with another text saying, "She's away on a Carnival bachelorette cruise to Mexico." She still did not respond. Fuck.

That's when it hit me that at the birthday party someone at our table had joked about killing her husband, and everyone laughed and toyed with the idea. Everyone but me. I was preoccupied imagining what everyone looked like having sex. Even the old people. I now see how my silence could have been misinterpreted to mean that I wanted to kill my wife. Fuck.

Of course the next thing that came to mind was the minor tiff, via text, that I'd had with my wife before she boarded the cruise ship. I sent her a screen grab of a collection of nudes I keep of her when I travel, and she responded by saying, "Those aren't my panties in the lower left. That's not me!" She was correct. Granted, the photos were sent to me by a photographer friend and not another woman, but I already knew how that would sound to a jury. Fuck.

The evidence was mounting against me, and by this point I was totally freaking out. So I did the only thing a fool having these thoughts could possibly do to incriminate himself further: I googled "How often do people fall off cruise ships?" You know, just so the cops could find that in my computer's history. Would you believe more than 20 people a year fall off cruise ships? And nearly half of them since 2000 occurred on Carnival Cruises? Fuck!

At that point I hadn't heard from my wife in two days due to lack of signal at sea, and I was just about ready to call the police on myself when my wife texted me from a café in Cancún with free Wi-Fi. She asked how our three- and five-year-old sons were doing. I hadn't even considered them in this whole sordid mess. What would come of them with no mother and a father in prison? I texted her back: "I love you. I hope the ship is safe. I DON'T WANT YOU DEAD. I NEVER WANTED YOU DEAD!" Was that too much? She didn't respond.

I wanted to blame a dropped signal, but what if the cartel got her and raped and beheaded her? FUCK!

How would that last text look to a jury? As I'm typing this I still haven't heard back from her. I'm thinking it's probably a bad idea to submit this to the editor since it may come off as somewhat suspicious.

More stupid can be found at Chrisnieratko.com or on Twitter.