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A Short Glimpse into Madness

Hey, all — sorry for the late entry tonight, but I just got back from a standup show at the Emerald Isle in Dorchester. Film at eleven.

(Which is code for, ‘sometime between now and October, I’ll copy the clip of my set over and post it’. Probably closer to ‘now’ than ‘then’, but I’m not making any promises. I think our relationship has progressed past empty promises, don’t you?)

Anyway, with the preparation for the show and another booty-kicking at work this week, I’ve really got nothing prepared for you guys. (I know, I’m a weenie. What can I tell you?) But I don’t want to leave you with nothing — which I’m pretty sure this still counts as, so far — so I thought I’d do something just a bit different tonight.

As an ‘aspiring comic, Esquire’, I’m fitted with the standard standup equipment — an overactive imagination, an even more overactive liver, tragically low self-esteem, and a handy-dandy notebook in which to write ideas for new material. Of these, let’s examine the last one, shall we?

(Mainly because a good hard look at the others would probably make me cry. The notebook may make me wince or groan or frown worriedly, but it won’t make me cry, so it’s safer.

Well, unless somebody were to try shoving it up my hoohah, maybe. That might make me cry. And probably go, ‘OOOOOAAAAUUUUGGGHHH!!‘, too, but I’m guessing that goes without saying. Or typing. Or thinking about very hard. Next topic.)

So, because I’m on the hook for an entry tonight, and have very little planned, I thought I might take a quick stroll through some recent entries in the old notebook and see what I can find. That’ll give you a taste of how this whole process works, from start to finish. It’ll probably also convince you that I desperately need either years of intense, aggressive psychotherapy or a quick Drano cocktail. Sounds like fun, dunnit? Let’s begin.

Okay, here’s something I scribbled recently:

‘What do they call Quiznos in the ‘hood?‘

See, this is why some things stay in the notebook, folks. At first, I thought there was a nugget of something funny in there — would it be ‘Quizzizzle’? ‘Da Quiznits’? ‘Quizzy D’s’?

But then I realized that’s about as far as I could take it. And that’s not very fucking far, dammit. Half a paragraph or so. I can wax poetic about the last dump I took for longer than that.

(Hell, come to think of it, I can take a dump for longer than that. The whole thing was done in fifteen seconds or so. Blink and you missed it. Fo’ quizzle.)

Okay, moving on… ah, here we go. If you watched my last show, you’ll have heard this one. But it bears repeating — mainly because there’s not a lot of usable shit in this notebook, and I’m reaching here. But at least a little because you might get a kick out of it. Or it’ll entice you — or guilt you — into watching the clip.

(Or tonight’s clip, once I have it up; it’s the same material, only without a discernable audience this time. You decide which is more pitiful — telling asinine jokes to an empty room, or making an ass out of myself in real, live public. Meh.)

Anyway, I had put together this bit elsewhere about going to college in Kentucky (true), and that despite many of the natives’ rather narrow-minded views on ‘family values’ and gay marriage (also true), the school I went to had an entire major devoted to something called ‘Animal Husbandry’.

(For the record, not true, though there were colleges in the area with classes on the subject.

Boy, these parentheses pretty much ruin the joke, don’t they? Dammit. See, this is why I don’t ad lib onstage. I’d never remember which tangent I was babbling on about, and my sets would last forty-two minutes without a punchline. Now where the hell was I again?)

Okay, ‘Animal Husbandry’. ‘Ew, gross. What’s up with that?‘ Fine. Here’s what I wrote in the notebook (and used onstage):

‘Personally, I’m not bumping uglies with anything that has a hairier ass than I do. And I wax twice a week, so it’s all my wife can do to keep up with me.‘

Ba-dum-bum. All righty. What else we got? Here’s one that’s completely zigged off my radar screen:

‘Parallel universe – sleeping, eating, etc.‘

Frankly, I have no fricking idea what the hell this premise was. Usually, I give myself enough to work with, but this one — nothing. Doesn’t ring a bell. And the details are no help, either — ‘sleeping’ and ‘eating’? Could I have been more frigging vague?

Thinking back on it, I have this fuzzy idea that it might have had something to do with an alternate world where things like sleeping and eating have crazy, embarrassing names… but that’s a long way to go for that, and it just doesn’t sound like something I’d find notebook-worthy, in and of itself.

Great. So either I’m a nincompoop because I wrote down a stupid premise, or I’m a turdball because I forgot something that might have been really good. Maybe I will cry, after all. Goddamned notebook, anyway.

Lessee what else is in here… not funny, too long, actually going to work that one into a bit… hmmm… oh, here’s one I’ve already given you (and don’t you feel special?):

‘Ambush boobjob‘

I think there might be enough in there to go onstage with — maybe I’ll try working that up one of these days. Also, in scanning through the notebook just now, I misread that note as:

‘Ambush blowjob‘

And fully apart from the fact that it probably tells you where my mind is at right now, that’s a whole other facet to the topic that I hadn’t thought of before. This one could go somewhere, folks.

Okay, one more. Let’s try to end on a high note. Or at least a higher note. Surely you wouldn’t want the idea of an ‘ambush blowjob’ to be the last thing you remember from this post, right?

(And that’s not counting the fact that it’s a preposterous idea. Blowjobs are one of a very few things that you would never have to sneak up on someone to get away with. Makeovers? Yes. Boob jobs? Perhaps. Liver transplants? Probably depends on which direction that liver was going, but yeah, I can see the need for a little stealth there.

But for the love of god, this is one area where you’re not likely to need any trickery to get the job done, so to speak. Just saying, ‘Hey, how’s about a blowjob, there, big fella?‘ would do it, if anything’s going to. Save the ambushery for when it’s needed, you know?)

All right, enough of that. One more nugget from the notebook, and then I’m hitting the sack. Here’s a couple of paragraphs’ worth of… well, something that came to me on the way home from the show tonight. I think I can turn it into something usable, but I’ll need to sleep on it and have a fresh look in the morning, when I’ve had less beer and more sleep. But, for your perusal and viewing plaisir, here’s what I scribbled down upon arriving home, verbatim:

‘I have a day job. Now, I don’t know about you folks, but I get pretty bored around the office… every six minutes or so.

I go to meetings, and use annoying, nonsense phrases like ‘shift the paradigm’ and ‘point of order’ and ‘baloney pony’.‘

Okay, I don’t know where that one’s gonna go, really. That’s all I’ve got so far. Maybe it’ll work itself into something, and maybe I’ll read this post in the morning and rue the day I ever bought my pocket notebook. Some things just are never meant to see the light of day, you know.

But, there it is. Another sordid chapter in the book of ridiculous mayhem that runs through my head, and occasionally gets put down on paper. Welcome to my nightmare, folks. Barf bags and protective ponchos are by the door. You’re gonna need both, sooner or later. Good luck.