Exactly one year ago today, I started a blog post in which I declared that I would start writing again on a regular basis. This was my painfully short draft, which I never finished:
“I’ve decided to start blogging again. Why? A lot of reasons, but mainly, I need to get back into the habit of writing something other than ad copy or blog posts for my day job. I want to write in a way that one of my favorite writing advisers once described as ‘breaking the rules.’ He always said that as a writer, you have to learn the rules before you can break them, and I still believe in that.”
A year later, I still believe it. I also believe in something one of my graduate advisers once said when I told her that I was suffering from writer’s block. “There’s no such thing as writer’s block,” she wrote to me in a letter, adding, “You’re just hesitating.”
I’m always hesitating. Waiting. Breaking the rules for no one and everyone. I suppose I feel that everything has been written, so what can I add to the story? That’s when I realize that I’m staring at a blinking cursor on the computer screen. I used to think that mediocre writers were just lazy. But maybe I’m the lazy one. Never trying. Always standing on that cliff waiting for someone to push me.
That’s when I start making mistakes. Big ones. I get careless with the people who love me the most, the ones who trust me when there’s absolutely no reason to trust me. I screw up relationships with friends and lovers because I can’t just take the plunge. But the one thing I know how to be is honest.
That’s why I’ve never understood fiction writers. Fiction is, by nature, dishonest, even though I get the attraction to fiction. I have the same attraction to films that are based on someone’s life. I’ve always imagined myself in a movie based on my own life, but there would be no pretense. The main character’s struggle is simple and haunting.
Her story is based on one question. A question she continuously asks herself, “Where did I go?” Maybe in the final cut, the audience sees that she’s always been here, with me.
Dear Dude at the Bar Who Called My Friend a Cunt for Cheering When the Blackhawks Won the Stanley Cup:
I’ll be honest. I am not a hockey fan. All I know about the game is what I learned from that time I attended a women’s match in the hopes of picking up one of the players, and from Bill Burr rambling about the Boston Bruins on his podcast. As much as I love that guy and his comedy, I still couldn’t give a shit about hockey. I tune out whenever I hear Burr’s iconic preamble to another gripe about the NHL or the playoffs. But perhaps I lost you at “iconic.” It’s a big word, I know.
Let’s get back to sports then. Football? Totes! I can get down with that. No, honestly, I think watching football sends endorphins to that same part of the brain satiated by greasy french fries at 3am after a night of drinking shots of cheap vodka and wondering if your life will ever amount to anything but shoving fried potatoes down your throat just hours before you have to shower for work.
Hell, I even get that element of soap opera drama to the entire enterprise. Humans need drama. We thrive on it. I think everyone here can agree that the sports industry provides needless drama in spades. But I still don’t get ice hockey.
That doesn’t mean I don’t get why you were so upset, sitting there in your Bergeron jersey, drinking your Sam Adams in honor of the team’s home turf. I’d be upset too if I were you. I mean, if the Bruins had won, think of all blurry pics of you drunkenly cheering at the bar that you never got to post on your Facebook wall. And the Tweets! My God, the brilliant Tweets you could have made about your team’s victory in 140 characters or less…
How many opportunities in this life do you get to say cool shit like that? Not many. Believe me, I have an MFA, and there aren’t many victories or momentous occasions in life–not even the birth of your first child–that warrant crafting such poetic brevity as a tweet that expresses how superior you really are. So I get it. It TOTALLY sucks, dude.
I bet you’re nodding your head right now and perhaps going for another beer to celebrate this little victory. Go for it, man! You deserve it!! It’s about time someone recognized the pain and difficulty of being just another white guy in this society.
Seriously, what’s next? What slippery slope are we sliding down when you can’t even boo the other team for winning?
I’ll tell you what’s next. You’ll no longer have the freedom to talk shit to some woman you don’t even know while she’s having a bonding moment with her father over the phone at the bar as they cheer for the team from her home town, or call her a cunt outside the bar just because your team didn’t win.
She’s my friend and all, but dude, she was totally being a cunt…
I think I may have lost a friend. I won’t get into the details too much, mostly out of respect for privacy, which is another issue I’ve been running into lately. How much do you reveal about your life in a blog, when all of our lives inherently involve other people? Even when you don’t mention names, it might be apparent to some whom you are referring to.
Then I get into that territory of over thinking and analyzing everything to death. I suppose an attempt to organize my thoughts here might work best.
Grief and Laughter
I keep saying that I wanted this blog to be a place to try out new material, to tell stories about the funny parts of my life. But I’m realizing more and more that without tragedy, there could be no comedy. That’s not to say that all things humorous come from a tragic event, though I do think that is the case for many comedians. It has more to do with the theory that without darkness, there would be no light – literally and metaphorically.
I do not know for sure that I’ve lost a friend, but evidently I’ve done something to cause someone I respect and admire to pull back. I try not to immediately assume that a lack of response from someone has anything to do with me, but at this point, it is clear that this person wants nothing to do with me, at least for now. Now, all I have left is to be patient. Not my strong suit by any means.
I’ve also been doing a lot of uncontrollable crying. Part of that has to do with grieving my father’s death all over again. I was never close to him. That’s no surprise to anyone who knows me well. When he died in 2009, my partner at the time traveled from Vermont to Alabama with me to be by my side at his funeral. Now, she and I barely speak. Yet another relationship I grieve every time I run across even the smallest reminder. The point is that I’ve lost a lot of close people in the past few years, some who are still alive, and I don’t think I am prepared to grieve another.
Catharsis
My father’s death was no surprise. His health had been declining for years. I was waiting for that phone call, though I admit it was a little shocking to hear my mother’s voice trembling over the phone on a random Tuesday evening. I remember thinking it was not the most convenient time for me to travel home. I know. A jackass move, but in my defense, I’ve read a lot of literature about grief and dying, and that’s a typical response. Something about the human experience lends itself to watching out for #1. We are selfish by nature, and in the shock of a death, we cannot think outside ourselves.
On Friday night, I rode my bike home after a potluck. A friend who is also a father had adjusted my breaks. It was a simple yet incredibly thoughtful thing to do. I walked into my empty apartment, looked over at a picture of my father in Vietnam, and I began to cry. It was one of those cathartic cries, when you can barely breathe and afterwards your head throbs and salt stings your eyelids. But that was apparently the catharsis I needed after weeks of being confused and worried about my place in the lives of others.
Anger and Sadness
I’ve written about anger so much that I’m beginning to wonder if I will ever conquer this demon (This post is much darker than I expected it to be – thanks for bearing with me those of you who are still reading). Therapist after therapist, I’ve been told that anger is a normal human emotion, and that it’s all in how we deal with it that dictates how people perceive us. I’ve already been tagged as that angry person, and to be honest, I’m tired of struggling to change my public image.
If there’s a take home message here, I suppose it would be this: The anger you see in other people most likely has nothing to do with you. I would dare to guess that 99.9% of it has nothing to do with you and everything to do with something that person has no control over. Judging the anger does not help. I cannot emphasize that enough to people who don’t understand anger. It only makes the person angrier, not at you, but at the injustice of how little control they have over it. Often, for me, it’s a choice. Severe depression or anger. There’s not much in between unfortunately.
Sadness and anger are very closely related. That’s perhaps the most useful scrap of knowledge that I have gleaned from years of therapy. My anger is so old and inexplicable that I am unable to retrace its steps to the source. But if I do not release it in some healthy way – which sometimes takes the form of misunderstood comedy – then I begin to grieve, even if there’s no one to grieve. Sometimes the sadness is just too much, and I have to choose the anger.
I was listening to a podcast recently, and one of the guests said that he used to go on long, angry rants on stage. Bill Burr was one of his influences, and he finally had the chance to hang out with Burr after a show. He said that he could see Burr in the back of the audience. He killed it that night. Pleased with his set, he got off stage and went over to Burr, who stood there shaking his head, and he said, “One day you’re going to figure out what you are so angry about.”
I have no idea what I’m so angry about, but I doubt I will ever figure it out. I don’t think there’s some ah-ha moment when we figure it all out. I think we just continue to look back and say, “Thank god I survived that shit.”
And then, if we’re smart, we find the humor in that which we cannot control.
I’ve put myself under quite a bit of pressure since my last post, mostly because you people keep following my blog. Please stop thinking that I’m smart and funny. I’m working on some new material, but for now, I’ll leave you with the latest news.
For those of you who have seen me do stand-up, you’ve probably heard my joke about being an old curmudgeon trapped in a 34-yr-old body. It’s true. I bitch about things that probably don’t matter to most people my age, including but not limited to the chronic lateness of the #6 bus, the misuse of the word “irony,” and the general use of the phrase, “We pride ourselves” as a marketing tool. I don’t know why, but whenever I see that on a website, I want to hack into their back end (not what you think it is, non-web people) and change it to “We take pride in,” just because I’m annoyed by how dumb it sounds to use “pride” as a verb.
I get it. Why so angry about something that doesn’t really matter to anyone but you, Ashley? Your rage doesn’t do any good for the world at large? It used to, or I thought it did. I once prided myself on having that political button – you’ve seen it, the one that says, “If you aren’t angry, you aren’t paying attention.” It was pinned to my bag for so long when I lived in Tucson that it eventually faded from the sun. But I just don’t really care anymore. Oh, I’m still a generally angry person, yet I turned it around and started making comedy out of how absurd it is that someone so small can have so much fire in her belly.
But recently someone said to me that she didn’t get the use of anger as a joke, or that it wasn’t funny to her. Her critique made me reevaluate my use of anger, even though it was a lot better than the old me (or the old man in me) who would just rant and rave and never have that little endorphin release at the end of a joke that made fun of myself for getting so angry over the price of socks (but seriously, have you bought socks lately?).
My anger makes people uncomfortable. So I try to scale it back a bit. Then another friend said something to me today about how I am a person who is all about process (terrible paraphrase, so I’m sorry for butchering your eloquence if you are reading). In any case, she’s right. This is really part of who I am. That’s what I was implying in a Facebook post recently that said something like, “I’m going to stop doing the comedy that everyone else wants and start doing the comedy that I want.”
No one commented on that publicly, but then plenty of people told me privately that they noticed the comment and then gave me their response to it in person. By the way, if you are one of those people who reads every single thing I put on Facebook but never “likes” or comments on any of it, it’s just creepy, okay. I know you aren’t trying to be a creeper, but think about it. You have no response or indication that you are even paying attention to me undress in front of everyone, and then you come to me to tell me that you were essentially “watching the whole time.” At least send me an email or something if you don’t want to out yourself in public, even though your entire life exists on a pubic forum.
But back to me. Then another friend told me in private that she hoped I’d “still be funny” after she read my comment about doing the material that I’m having fun with instead of worrying about impressing other people. I wasn’t sure how to respond. Again, I have no point to any of this, except to find another excuse to bitch about something most people claim to not give two shits about, but if you want my opinion, and obviously you do, because otherwise you would’ve stopped reading after the #6 bus gripe…I think you do give a shit.
I guess that’s it. Oh, and, in the next post, I’ll discuss what’s funny and why I think it’s funny and let you decide if I’m being a parody of myself, just myself, or just an asshole with a blog and a wonderful sense of sentence style.
I’m annoyed. And soaking wet. Let’s begin with that.
A few hours ago, I ran down to the bus stop so that I could watch Sara Schaefer warm up a local comedy club, after which I planned to watch her at the Green Mountain Comedy Festival, along with some of my favorite locals, such as Carmen Lagala (ps, stay tuned for a new podcast featuring local lady comics, including Natasha Druhen, Autumn Spencer, Hillary Boone, Melissa Moran, Cori Marnellos, and other hilarious ladies who don’t have Twitter accounts because they can).
Instead, I ended up back home, standing in front of my apartment door, literally dripping wet, looking like an ornery old man Meme.
Point is, I was looking forward to hopping a ride on the wonderful public transportation system we have here in Burlington, and hearing all these hilarious comedians who I really wanted to see live tonight. Then, the CCTA apparently signed the, “Hey, why don’t we form an alliance against anyone who can’t afford a car or doesn’t want to get killed while riding a bike in a lightning storm” treaty with the weather, which once again, caused me to miss the last bus downtown tonight.
No, I don’t have a point to this, except to say that I don’t understand how something can cause me to be so cantankerous that I bitch about everything from YouTube comedy week and the dumb weather to the dumb buses that caused me to miss tonight’s shows that I replaced with writing and watching these guys make this dumb video while running around in the rain.
I promised myself that this blog would be funny. The last few posts have been so damn serious that it has now justified a public apology to that fan club I invented on my 20-minute walk from the bus stop to my office.
That said, I have been experimenting with some podcast-like material that I wanted to run by my readers. Love it, hate it, don’t care, just be honest.
Here’s how it works: I hit the pound key on the phone after leaving one my signature, long-ass rambling voice mails to various close friends, which allows me to listen to this raw message I’ve just left to someone I love and trust. Then I replay the message, putting it on speaker phone in front of the computer, and after it’s recorded, I edit.
Season 1
Pilot: Just to have children that we’re never gonna have.
* I have removed the recording until I can figure out a better way to incorporate the blog with my website. Stay tuned…
On my bus ride to work this morning, I read the Sports Illustrated article about Jason Collins – the first openly gay male athlete in a major U.S. sport. I’d been carrying the magazine in my messenger bag for days. Usually, I listen to a comedy podcast or jot down notes on a set that I’m working on. But after completely choking on stage last night at the Higher Ground Comedy Battle, I wanted nothing to do with comedy.
The article turned out to be a perfect distraction. Plus, Bill Burr had talked about it on a recent podcast with the lovely Nia. Their lively debate and the Collins article inspired me to make an official statement of sorts, not as a gay athlete, but as a gay comedian. The tagline in the article did its job. It got my attention:
I’m a 34-Year-Old NBA Center. I’m Black. And I’m Gay.
Like Collins, I’m 34-years old. And I’m gay. I’m not an NBA player, and I have no idea what that’s like. I would assume that he will get hecklers and haters, just like anyone in the spotlight, literally and metaphorically. The point is that he came out, giving him the freedom to admit something to himself and to those around him.
And what I want is to continue to play basketball. I still love the game, and I still have something to offer. My coaches and teammates recognize that. At the same time, I want to be genuine and authentic and truthful.
I choked on stage last night. It was brutal. Not only did I draw a blank, but I also drew attention to the fact that I had no idea what my next joke was. It’s not even that I cared about winning. I cared because I was disappointed in myself, and I was embarrassed.I told everyone that I was done with comedy, that I’d never get back on stage.
Today, thanks to you, Mr. Collins, what I want is to get back on stage, because I still love the game. And I recognize that I have something to offer. I am funny because I am “genuine and authentic and truthful.”
I now have the freedom of having nothing else to lose.
I’m working on a new joke about my liver watching old documentaries about coal miners in West Virginia, after which it (she? he? what pronoun do you use when personifying the liver?) threatens to stand on a table like Sally Fields in Norma Rae if I have one more whiskey. You have to hear it on stage I guess, which you can this coming Tuesday.
So, I’m working on that and going through some older Myq Kaplan podcasts, and I happen to download the episode with Jared Logan and Erin Judge, which I listened to on my way to the office where I just quit my job and had to get my personal belongings. Fun fact, I was “escorted” to my desk so that I could retrieve the three rice cakes, a toothbrush, and half a box of tampons that were such a security risk.
Not exactly the exit strategy I’d planned, but in any case, the podcast was the perfect setup for that moment when I left the building to the awkward silence from co-workers who weren’t quite sure if they should disapprove or applaud my finger to management.
In the podcast, Jared discusses how his family in West Virginia disapproves of his career as a comedian. I won’t get into the entire discussion, because you really have to hear him talk about his grandmother and her wish for him to be in the Supreme Court. I will say that the point to this blog post, if there is one, is that needing approval from the audience can lead to the “I’m only joking (not really)” clause that can ruin a joke.
I will also say that you should watch Logan’s clip from John Oliver’s New York Stand-Up Show in which he tells the jokes that his family disapproves of, which he mentions in the podcast, which also features the very hilarious Erin Judge (see link above).
The first time I ever heard Lenny Bruce’s name was in one of my favorite R.E.M. songs; all I knew was that Lenny Bruce was not afraid. And that I was in love with Michael Stipe. This was 1988.
Circa 1998, I was a Freshman in college. It was the first time I heard the phrase, “If you can’t say fuck, you can’t say fuck the government.” Lenny Bruce, again. What I knew that it was a statement about freedom of speech and the frivolity of laws.
2008: Ten years later. I belly laugh to a political joke on The Daily Show, and I am pulled out of the trap of depression.
Less than a decade later, I’m preparing for a show. And I’m most grateful for the courage to say “fuck” on stage.
Exactly one year ago today, I started a blog post in which I declared that I would start writing again on a regular basis. This was my painfully short draft, which I never finished:
I Am Not a Mommy (Blog) 