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Everybody's a Comedian

A note.

Something I would like to always remember:

"One of the great failings of literary theory has been that the writing is not only impersonal, it also seeks mightily to be free of contradictions." --Amitava Kumar

MARCEL THE SHELL WITH SHOES ON

The Day That Andy Dick Died--Part I

The day that Andy Dick died, there was an emergency meeting called by the Sunset Strip Chapter of The Greater Hollywood Counsel for the Preservation of Industry Traditions and Historical Conventions Society (G.HO.C.P.O.I.T.A.H.C.S., or just GHOCS, for short) regarding the inevitable tourist backlash such a death would cause to the fragile business economy along the famed community front.

It's a well-known fact among those in the know throughout Hollywood that a major part of what drives tourism along the Strip is that people can, on almost any night of the week, expect to enjoy some kind of star sighting or another. Kevin Nealon and several other very famous personalities are known to perform at the comedy clubs there at least a few nights out of the week--especially on Tuesdays.

Before I begin, however, one short note regarding expectations: Often, when a person hears that they can expect to have one sort of experience or another, they confuse this to mean that it is more than likely to occur. This is very often not the case. A person can expect to have any number of experiences throughout their lifetime, and these expectations may or may not coincide with reality.

Furthermore, rampant and irresponsible cultivation of a set of expectations which can best be classified as "elite" lead many people to habitually deny any range of experience that falls short of this sphere. People can't get locked out of their cars anymore, they don't miss your calls, and the delivery is never 10 minutes too late. Everything arrives exactly the way that you intended it to, or there will be hell to pay. There is no longer an opposing team in the game.

To say that one's expectations for this or that thing are "high" will generally be construed as a good or positive thing. I would simply like the reader to note that my use of the term "expect" does not coincide with the current view. Rather, the term "expect" as I am intending to convey its meaning falls into the Merriam-Webster definition of: "typically contrasted with the actual."

(One further short note is that the actual Merriam-Webster definition of the word "expectation" is not, as aforementioned, "typically contrasted with the actual," but the Merriam-Webster definition of the word "actual" is "typically contrasted with what was intended, believed, or expected." Therefore if x + y = z, then it must also follow that y + x also = z.)

A common axiom (especially among those like myself who were raised in particularly Buddhist cultures) is that having expectation is synonymous with having disappointment, and that the higher the level of expectation, the higher the level of disappointment. Therefore, please interpret the phrase: "It is a well-known fact among those in the know throughout Hollywood that a major part of what drives tourism along the Strip is that people can, on almost any night of the week, expect to enjoy some kind of star sighting or another" instead to mean that people visiting the Sunset Strip can, on almost any night of the week, expect to suffer some kind of disappointment.

In fact, this very relationship between expectation and disappointment was the issue on the table of GHOC the day that Andy Dick died, because this connection is the foundation that all commerce it built upon. Somewhere in-between what's being promised and the failure to deliver it must be a dangling carrot--something to drive the cart forward and keep driving it forward indefinitely.

That carrot, for the hopeful tourists flocking the Strip, for the businessmen and women whose livelihoods depended on its flourishing, and for the powerful hooded magistrates of the GHOC, was Andy Dick. Until the day that he suddenly and unexpectedly died.

.

Why-Oh-You.

You.

You will find nothing of yourself here.

You will find nothing of yourself here, and if you've come looking to find you, you will turn away disappointed.

This is the story of a boy, but if you are a boy, this is still not the story of you. This is the story of a boy who is not you, so keep that in mind as you are reading. That's the main thing to remember, the main thing that can distinguish this boy from all other boys: this boy was not you.

That isn't to say that all other boys are you, just that I wouldn't know anything about that. I don't know who all the other little boys are, whether they are you or they or someone or something else. I don't have the faintest idea who the other boys are at all, or even if they exist.

For instance: Do other little boys stand in the snow? And if they do, do they stand in the same spot for the same reasons? If you have already answered yes, then do their mothers also watch from the windows as their hands wrinkle in the dirty dishwater?

Do the other mothers of other little boys also shake their heads and sigh? Do they also say the words "early day tomorrow" to no one in particular?

There are other things I would like to know.

Do all little boys fall in love with their snowflakes? Do they all stand outside in that spot at night and stare as the snow falls down because that is the only spot where the light from the lamppost in the alleyway will show the snow as it's falling? The snow as it passes from the sky to rest on the ground? Do they all like the way that the snow twists and turns? Do they all find that one sympathetic snowflake impossible to leave? And, if so, do they all cry at the mere sight of it?

What do other boys stare at?

What do things look like to other little boys? Do the things that they stare at look like they looked to this little boy? Does each snowflake speak to them in a new and special way?

Are other little boys capable of staring without blinking? Or do the other little boys have to blink and look away? What are the other little boys thinking of as they are staring at the snowflakes?

Do other little boys stare so long that they also do not realize they are freezing with their eyes open? For the last time, I will tell you: I can only claim to have known this one little boy. I believe he may be the only boy that ever existed, and that you may be trying to mislead me.

This little boy was five years old. He was five years old and 67 days. In agreed-upon time, one year of this boy's life was worth 365 days. That comes to 1825 days plus 67 extra days. Plus one extra day for a leap year. That's 1893 days, or 2,725,920 minutes. What does five minutes mean to this little boy's life? What percentage of this boy's life was encapsulated in five minutes? What percentage of the world is encapsulated in the .0254 M. that is a snowflake? In each case, for this boy, the answer is the same.

What about the mothers of the other little boys? Do the other mothers of other little boys also turn away for a second only a second and look back to see that he has frozen to death? And if they do, do the mothers of other little boys also shriek?

Imagine this mother's excitement when she looks across the yard at the body of her cold, dead son. Screams, too, can be built from a place of excitement. Is all excitement like the excitement that a mother feels when she first sees her son dead? Do all screams come from the same place?

How can you distinguish between the screams of a mother who's little boy has just frozen to death and the other kinds of screams a little boy's mother might make? Aren't they all the same, in their own way? Aren't they all like the snowflakes?

Aren't all snowflakes just snowflakes, and aren't they all the same? Is every snowflake different or is it the same?

How long does it take other little boys to freeze to death while watching the snowflakes? Does it take one snowflake falling, or twelve, to die? Or even more than that? How long does it take a snowflake to fall, and what happens to the snowflake once it has fallen and you can no longer watch it with your open eyes?

Do the mothers of other little boys also cry into their hands when the men come to put a blanket over her little boy? Do the other mothers also grab the man by his elbow and say I swear it was only five minutes?

What is five minutes to another little boy? Is five minutes one hour or is it ten turns of the lamp post on and off? Is five minutes the same to all little boys? How much snow can fall in five minutes?

I don't know.

How do you measure time in snow? And whose time is the real time--Is your time the real time, or is the boy's time the real time? Even a quantum physicist will tell you what I am about to tell you: that time is not the same for everyone. Even Stephen Hawking, sitting in his chair, will tell you the very same thing.

Was Stephen Hawking also once a little boy? How long was he a little boy and how long has he been in his chair? Can we agree upon the length of time, or did he also like to watch the snow fall? Let's not forget the meaning of relativity: to a child of two years old, one year is not 365 days. It is half a lifetime.

So, I will ask you again: how long does it take a little boy of five years old to freeze to death? How long did this little boy stand there and stare? And how long is five minutes to a boy who can't take his eyes off the sky? If we can answer just this question, then all the rest of the answers will fall in line like the snow.

What do other little boys fall in love with? Do they fall in love with the trees or with the ground? Or with other little boys? Which boy's love is the real love?

And Is love something you've imagined many times before as the love between a cold, dead boy and his snowflake?

Summer

Hot Wet Wool

I don't remember how it started, just that it involved one of those highly controversial naked celebrity magazine covers that gets circulated throughout the nation about once every month or so.

Like, I don't get why it's such a big deal. Who cares that she's naked?

Not me. It doesn't make me more likely to buy the magazine. I don't even like naked people.

Me neither. I don't like being naked, myself.

I know! Why does everyone else like it so much? It's like they can't wait to take their clothes off.

It was the summer of '07, and Tom* and I were visiting Hollywood for the first time. If a Daniel Clowes panel were happening in real time, it would be Mel's Diner, but we didn't know that at the time. We just got all excited about the advertising outside the diner that makes it appear to be an old Hollywood staple--the kind of place where businessmen make movie deals go down, or used to back in the '60's.

I don't even like it when I'm by myself.

Me neither! You know how everyone always talks about how they like to sleep naked? I never do that. I have to be fully clothed, even if it's hot outside.

Yeah, me too. I don't even like looking at myself naked. I can't walk around my apartment naked or anything like that. People like that weird me out.

Like Matthew McConaughey.

Our booth was in the dead center of the diner on a fairly busy morning, and there were all types of strange, eccentric, glum-looking types around us. People with exaggerated features who looked like they were just saturated with sad life experiences that probably involved weird relationships with their cats and decades-long leases in apartments with outdated wallpaper.

I know! I don't even like getting naked to take a shower!

Totally. But no one ever understands that. People are always so ready to get naked over any little thing. And they think we're the weird ones.

But we're not.

Right. We're not.

We were tourists in a strange town, far away from home, and here was yet another level to our outsider status. It was as though we had wandered into some kind of character actor's convention and joined in because we couldn't find a convenient back door to slip out of. So, we were stuck there and we flip-flopped between micro-focusing on our own little booth and macro-focusing on the surreality of the surroundings. It's worth noting that we're also both writers, which not only means that we generally reek of desperation and are afraid of everything, but also that we were are that much more prone to do anything within our power to try to fit in.

But don't you feel like you need some kind of excuse for not liking to be naked or something?

Yeah. Most people that hate being naked have a good excuse for it. But I don't. I've just always been that way.

That summer everyone in the world was talking about some magazine with some shivering naked Disney starlet on the cover. Like I said, I don't even remember which one it was anymore. Just that it led to a bigger discussion about nudity and how everyone was doing it. What was the big deal? We couldn't figure it out.

Sometimes I just wish I had something to blame. Like, my mom is also weird about nudity, and from the time that I was a small child, she would wrap me up in hot, wet wool to make me associate my own skin with being really uncomfortable.

Yeah, that's a good one, actually. I think I might use that from now on.

You should. I can't imagine anything more uncomfortable than being wrapped up in hot, wet wool. Besides just being naked.

By the time that our waiter brought us the bill, we had the whole thing completely figured out. It was a perfectly valid excuse that later extended into a more elaborate storyline about how our mothers put hot dogs into our macaroni and cheese and told us they were the fingers of bad boys and girls.

God, will you just look at these people? What a bunch of freaks!

Yeah. What do you think their lives are like?

Who even knows.

* name has been changed, but you can read his blog HERE! Check it out. He's a very funny fellow.

The Disappearance of Amelia Flitscher--Part I

"Is it wrong that I dream about coffee?"

No. People dream about weird things when they're stressed out.

I'm not dreaming about coffee because I'm stressed out about it.

Well, maybe you're stressed out about something else?

Like what?

I don't know. Getting to work on time?

No, I feel fine about that.

You're stressed out now, though.

That's because I used to dream about flying and turning into a magical hunchback. Now, I dream about coffee.

Well, I wouldn't worry about it. Table three looks ready to get out of here.

She could never quite be sure who out there was judging her for stopping off at Starbuck's every morning for a three dollar coffee, but she rest assured that there was someone smugly doing just that. So, allow me to explain this habit before it turns you off completely. She was living alone at the time, with no coffee maker, and it was a good 45 minute drive to work, with clear traffic. What's more, we had to be there, ready to smile and make small talk, at the ungodly hour of 6 a.m. You do the math. (I can't, because I haven't had any coffee yet.) Like, if the sun doesn't even want to be up at that time of day, how the hell can we be expected to pull it off? But, she did, and so did I, and it's always for the money. The money was good, even if the job sucks the life out of you and the hours turn you into a walking zombie for the first year. After that, you find yourself getting used to the whole routine, and you adjust. It's a great job for people who need to pay the rent, but really want to be doing something else. And doesn't everyone out here want to be doing something else?

I don't mean to get defensive--it's just that she's not here to defend herself, and she really was one of my best friends. We didn't exactly hang out outside of work, but that doesn't matter. We were friends. The coffee thing is still a touchy matter to this day and everyone still talks about it, so I just feel like I need to clarify. She explained to me later that the main problem was that she was dreaming about something she was about to do in real life, anyway. It would be just as disconcerting if she woke up in the middle of a dream about driving to work, or taking a shower, or bringing someone a plateful of home fries.

But people do that all the time, dream about everyday things.

Yeah but this has been the fourth or maybe the fifth dream in a row where I've dreamt about things I do in real life. It just seems like the bar is really being lowered. If your life is mundane, then your dreams have to be big enough for you to tell the difference.

Well, what about someone whose life is never mundane? Like Michael Jackson? What kind of thing would he dream about?

Coffee.

I laughed at her, but now I can see that she wasn't kidding. I still didn't see the dream thing as a problem. When I was working as a clerk at the law firm, for instance, I used to dream about filing clients' names alphabetically all the time.

I spent so many hours doing it that my mind just couldn't stop. That's half the reason I quit, actually.

None of this seemed to convince her at all. She was weird and quiet for the rest of the day, and she didn't even try to make small talk with the customers or the busboys. She was faraway and then forgot to say goodbye before she left. I figured she'd get over it and be back to normal by Monday, but she went on like that for a few more weeks. I tried to get her to talk about it a couple more times, and I'd ask her how the dreams were coming.

Still the same.

When I pressed her, she told me that she'd had dreams about brushing her teeth, filling up ice cube trays, and getting her tires changed. Once she had a dream strictly about waiting for her Britta pitcher to filter the water.

Then one day, she just disappeared. I drove to her house after she didn't show up to work, and Thomas, the landlord, was already showing someone else through the apartment. He seemed really pissed when I asked him if there was a forwarding address. I never saw or heard from her again. I did hear from one of our old regulars that he had seen her on a trip to Santa Fe, doing a one-woman street performance as a hunchback who balances a cat atop her shoulder, begging change for coffee with an empty cup.

A Few of My Favorite Things

Ice Cream!!

New Jeans!!

Blue Shoes!!

Days Off!!

iPod!!

Sunglasses!!

This Day!!

These People!!

Secrets & Words

When I was a kid, I made an early habit of keeping a diary. I started because, like so many other things, when I asked my mom "Why?" she explained, between her furious scrawling, that it was "good for you." I also developed an early habit of taking things people said very literally. For instance, when I was six, I overheard a friend of my parents' turn down an offer for a beer, saying: "I don't drink." Phenomenal decision! I thought. If only I had known all along that drinking was a choice, I could have saved myself a lot of time! So it was only natural for me to want to grow up doing what was good for me, like eat my vegetables, play in the sun, and keep a diary.

Every new book was a whole new person, in my eyes--a person to whom I needed to acquaint myself over time, be polite, and make false promises. Every first diary entry would begin with me explaining who I was and what I planned to do on those pages: My name is Rebekah, I'm in fifth grade, and I have a crush on Ian, but he doesn't go to my school. I'm going to write in you every day and I promise you are the only diary I will every write to, and I will never write to another diary, not ever.

When each notebook was nearly full, I would be overcome with a sense of anxiety and The Dread of Completion, where I'd become so aware of the end of the relationship I had built that all I could think about was how to end it faster. I'd purposely increase the size of my handwriting for a few pages just to get on with the whole thing. Maybe it was like the young diary-keeper's version of I'll leave you before you can leave me. That diary's dwindling lack of space for my secrets and words was a direct insult to the amount of time I'd invested in creating that diary's whole inanimate but nonetheless very thorough personality. Not fair. The more I wrote, the more personality the diary had, and the less available it was for more of me.

In the final moments of the final page, the remorse would hit me, and I'd frantically try to diminish my scrawl, but to no avail. The diary was Dead. Done. Over. Finito. And then I knew I'd have to throw it away. Because there were no more blank pages left. And the whole point was to make sure that you filled up all the pages.

It took me a few more years to figure out that I didn't have to throw my diaries away once they were full--I could fill them up and keep them. Then, it took me a few more years to realize that filling them up and keeping them was really the whole point, after all. And then another decade or so to understand that I also didn't have to do that, either--I didn't have to fill them all up and then carry them around with me everywhere I went. I could throw them all away again. And then fill them up. And then throw them away. And then fill them up again. And again. And again. And again.