Oh yeah, blogging

Taking a break from Silence Speaks today. The next bit is going to be tricky. Plus, it’s Sunday and I feel lazy. And I haven’t done the bloggity blog thing since Wednesday, so I am due.

Writing Silence (working title, will def be changed) has been awesome. I guess I kind of stumbled into doing my own NaNoWriMo. I am already brainstorming for what I will write next. Writing fiction is a trip.

Such a trip that sometimes, I get a little depressed when I stop. For a while, I was fully engaged, which is exceedingly rare for me. When I stop it’s like the world suddenly goes back to black and white from being full HD Technicolor. Coming down from that writing high can be hard.

I have seen rock stars say that the drugs and alcohol weren’t to help them with the pressures of fame or any of that bullshit. They were to help them come done from the high of making music. Performing.

There must be nothing like it. To be up there in front of scores of fans, making sweet sweet music as they adore you, being connected to the audience and the band and the music and everything. I can’t think of any other form of performance that would give you that kind of high.

Not even stand up comedy.

That’s the real reason these people can’t stop performing. They are addicted to that high. Us casual observers might wonder why Mick Jagger and the rest of the Stones keep going on tour. We might even cynically assume that they only do it for the money.

But these guys are already rich. The money wouldn’t be enough to get them to do it any more.

No, they do it because performance is a drug and you can only get a dose by performing.

I obviously have never been in a band, but I have been in the cast (and then some) of plays, and so I know what it is like to be in front of an audience. It feels amazingly good. Scary, but in the excited way, not the terrified way. It is like riding shotgun on a speeding train. Exciting, but also kind of scary.

And when they laugh…. that’s truly when the sky opens up and love comes pouring down.

Being a rock star must raise that to the power of music. Making music can be a real high even if nobody else is around. Doing it in a band must be amazing in and of itself.

Put the audience into the equation and…. wow.

So who knows. I might not be interested in working in theatre, but I have the performing bug. Maybe this stand up comedy thing will work for me.

Lord knows, I would love a job where all I have to do is talk to people. For me, that seems like being paid to do what I love to do anyhow. Even factoring in have to write jokes and sweat over them and perfect them and all that doesn’t make it seem that much harder. None of that is something I feel is outside my wheelhouse.

I keep Hot Wheels in my wheelhouse. It’s a Hot Wheelhouse.

See? There’s a joke. A terrible one, and I would never use it in a standup set. But that came to me with virtually no effort at all. My mind produces jokes like plants produce oxygen. It’s just a natural byproduct of me being alive.

Being a stand up comedian would add pressure to the equation, and I certainly would have to keep the “accessible jokes” separate from the “too weird for the general public) jokes. But I don’t mind a certain degree of populist intent in my crafting of jokes. I will never do material I think sucks and isn’t funny, but that doesn’t mean I am some uncompromising purist.

I’m not any kind of purist, really. I don’t trust it. Purity ethics always turn evil.

So I would be quite content writing jokes to make Joe Average laugh. In fact, such is my ego and my pride that I would be determined to make my accessible jokes better than everyone else’s.

Being accessible doesn’t mean being terrible. Thinking anything that isn’t high art must suck is a narrow minded and elitist view. Sure, there will always be things which are awful and yet popular, but that does not mean all popular thing must be awful.

Logic doesn’t work that way. The fact that A includes some B does not imply that A = B, and thinking that it does is just a lazy shortcut through the evidence to a prejudice.

And odds are, whoever you think of is a good comedian is also very popular, or you never would have heard of them.

One thing I have always pondered about being a stand up comedian is all the travel. I don’t drive, so I guess I would have to get really, really comfortable with Greyhound. Probably get one of those unlimited pass things to save money.

Plus I just love the idea of being able to get on any Greyhound whenever I like. I have always wanted that Golden Ticket. The magical ticket that means I can get on any plane, bus, cruise, train, whatever. A Greyhound pass would be a little like that.

Now I am picturing myself writing jokes on a Greyhound, then recording me performing them onto my tablet so I could figure out how to make them funnier.

There are worse ways to live, I suppose.

And hey, being a standup comedian is just a stepping stone to having a sitcom these days anyhow, and if my the grace of Whatever someone handed me a sitcom, I would make the best fucking sitcom ever.

It’s the job I have been training for my entire life. If I could star in and write my own sitcom, that would be a lot like dying and going to Comedy Writer Heaven to me.

Heck, I’d be happy just writing it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

The silence speaks, part 11

You know what it’s like to be a miracle? It stinks.

So’s I goes into the hospital knowing that when I leave, it’ll be on a slab. Suits me fine. There’s nobody to miss me and nobody I’ll miss. Fuck this stinking world anyway. The only people I ever called friends were nothing but drinking buddies, and I only see my mother on her birthday when I go piss on her grave in memory of what an unrelenting cunt she was to me from the day I was born till the day I left that bitch behind for good when I was fifteen years old.

Plus, I like checking in to see if she’s still dead.

So I was ready to check out. Accounts all settled. Paid all my debt. Gave away some knicky knacky stuff I never really gave a shit about anyway. Left a few bags of cash in some odd places for some lucky person to find. Hell knows I don’t know anybody who actually deserves it. So I gave it to the world instead.

I packed my bags and was ready to go to whatever’s next. Hopefully, nothing at all.

Let’s just say that I never once thought I was going to Heaven, and that only leaves one other option, right?

So there I am in the hospital, ready to check out. Pain’s real bad but the drugs here are good. A nice, clean high. Whatever they gave me, I could make a mint selling it on the streets.

Then The Big One hits. Everything in me fucking up at once. Hallelujah, I think. This clusterfuck is finally coming to an end.

And for a long while, everything is quiet, dark, and calm. It’s so peaceful and soothing. It was like being asleep and awake at the same time. Nothing bothered me, nobody was trying to make me do stupid shit, there was no noise, no smell, no ugliness, people being shitty to each other. I wasn’t even breathing and I didn’t care. I could have stayed there forever.

I don’t know. Guess I would have gotten bored eventually. But it was nice while it lasted.

But eventually, light starts coming in from somewhere, and then comes the sunrise. That’s the only way I can think of to describe it. The light grew brighter, I felt stronger, the feeling of growth and power grew in me, and the calm of the nothingness went away and the joy of being alive took its place.

I thought, if this is what all that religion was about, maybe I was wrong about that Jesus stuff.

Naw, fuck him. Where was Jesus when my mom was beating me? Where was He when she would shove her hand down my pants and grabbed my little wiener so she could laugh at my little “shrinky dink”? Where we He when she would lend me out to all her pervert junkie friends like I was VCR?

“Just bring him back in one piece. ” she’d say. “I need him to buy smokes for me. ” And she’d laugh.

Fuck you, Jesus. Too little and way, way too late, you useless hunk of shit.

Anyway, I come out of the coma and I see all these fancy doctor types looking at me like I was a pony they all bet their life savings on and it’s a 20 to one shot. When they see I’m awake, they all start smiling and some asshole from the papers takes my picture and all kinds of hubbub.

And at first I’m enjoying it. Who doesn’t like being the center of attention now and then? The first thing I says when I wakes up “Geez, is it my birthday already? How long was I asleep?”

And everybody laughed, me included, and for a while there it was real nice. Lots of important type people wanted to talk to me, big time celebrity news types interviewed me, doctors from places I’d never even heard of were going on and on about how me coming back from the dead was medically impossible given all my organ and tissue damage and blah blah blah. I didn’t understand most of what they said to me, but I sure liked the attention and how nice everyone was being to me.

So this is what being a celebrity is like, I thought. It ain’t half bad.

But then most of them went away when me being alive stopped being news, and that’s when I learned the first harsh rule of being a modern medical miracle : it doesn’t pay.

Not one red fucking cent. People sold newspapers, TV shows got ratings, lots of doctor types got published, hell even the nurse I thought was my best friend in the world sold me out and moved to Florida.

But me? I didn’t get one dime. None of those parasite bastards even thought to pay my hospital bill. It only took around a week for me to go from top of the news to bottom of the “ward of the state” shit list.

Keeping me alive was expensive, and they never let me fucking forget it.

And that’s when the washouts started. I’d be going along, watching TV or shooting the shit with the orderlies or jerking off or whatever, and then it would be like a rainbow tide from deep inside my head would suddenly swell up and the next thing I would know, it would be hours later and nobody wanted to look me in the eye, let alone tell me what the fuck happened.

Soon I figured out that I was losing more time every time I washed out, and it became harder and harder to think straight or stay focused. I couldn’t even watch TV because I would forget what was going on every time there was a commercials.

I got so tired and confused that eventually, I said fuck it, and the next time the tide rushed in, I just let it take me away. Didn’t put up no fight at all. I figured, wherever it’s been trying to take me, it has to be better than this.

Next thing I know, I’m watching some weird kind of science fiction show about a guy made out of energy who helps people.

Seemed like a decent enough show to me. Decided I’d watch it for a while.

It wasn’t until years later that I figured out where the show was coming from.

It wasn’t much fun to watch after that.