Kendall Makes a Surprising (Not Too Surprising) Discovery

Last year, to announce my thesis defense, I printed up a bunch of clown poster that I thought were really funny and cool and weird, and posted them all over the English department. Most everybody else found the posters not so funny, not so cool, but definitely weird. And creepy. I was accused of causing nightmares. I heard more than one person announce how delighted they would be when my thesis defense was over and the awful posters came down.

I was so confused, because I didn't feel frightened by the clowns. If anything, I felt a degree of identification. And yesterday, looking through old photos on my computer, I figured out why:

Me, surprised, at my twenty-fifth birthday party (surprised by not only the birthday party, but also by James Joyce's erotic love-letters to his wife, which were a unique gift from a dear friend who went to the trouble of printing them off the internet):

Chucko the Clown, surprised for reasons unknown:

Apparently, we're related.