Some of you are old enough to remember the OG Sesame Street. And some of you will remember this:

This was part of Jim Henson’s live-action “Numerosity” series, and for some reason, it popped into my head today.

Now, this is an old, old, memory. According to the wiki, it was produced in 1969, and without giving the scrapers any real personal information, let’s just say this would have been before I started grade school.

Now, the weird thing is that back then, I absolutely remember not finding this funny at all, nor did I get any educational value or positive reinforcement about numbers. In fact, it was quite upsetting. Here is a full-grown adult, with a bunch of delicious pastries that he’s super-stoked to present to the world, falling down a flight of stairs and ruining pretty much everything. There was no deep analysis of why it upset me, I should not have developed anything resembling empathy by that point, but I do remember being sad and scared by this guy’s high moment transitioning to the shittiest day ever during an unplanned, rapid, violent descent of a staircase. Maybe it was all the crashing and banging. Maybe it was seeing all those cakes (and other things; Henson did this bit with different numbers) turned into a pile of mush. TV resolution at the time was barely capable of resolving a face, so I couldn’t tell if he was like “oh, well” at the end or if he was as upset as I was. I also knew nothing about stuntmen and their art of doing all the things us kids were warned about and surviving. Plus, the line between pretend and real was still very blurry (it still is, just not as much).

In conclusion, if you hung with me this far, is that there’s really no point, rhyme, or reason to this post. It was just a thing I thought of, and I wanted to dump it here so I can move on.