What you should do to be better, like me

They say if you’re a comedian that you should write every day. So am I just supposed to start writing? What the fuck am I supposed to write? Something that some drunk laptop snooper will pull up late one night after I fall asleep and read and mock me for? Great. Let’s get right to that. Well I’m putting this on my blog so I guess it doesn’t even matter.

Free association typing is supposed to open up your soul and enter your subconscious. Supposedly there’s this deep trove of art or some shit in there. But apparently you have to write for 7,000 hours before you can get to it. Let me get cracking on that assignment.

Allen Ginsberg said if you write all day you’ll get to your feelings and your consciousness. All day? Really? Fuck dude. I don’t mind thinking all day but writing all day? Maybe I should train my mind to get better at writing for longer periods of time. I’ll turn into this evil little hermit writer who peers suspiciously over his shoulder while he writes and is always showing up a little late for chess matches. There. I changed “appointments” to “matches.” Maybe writing does make your thinking sharper. It’s working! Oh my god you guys it’s working! I’m fucking brilliant now! This only took two paragraphs! What a euphoria I swim in.

I don’t mind thinking ridiculous things all day, some of which are probably tedious or self indulgent or both. If I start capturing all that shit on paper it’s going to document and catalog my ridiculousness. But wait, the redeeming part: No one will care. That’s the best part. No one cares about the minutiae of other people’s lives. Not really. Not for long. Or even if they do it’s a small subset of people. It’s all about what Dave Eggers wrote in A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. He talked about how many people he’d slept with and then published it in a book that sold millions of copies. Today, how many people in this country could identify how many people he’d slept with when he wrote that book? A few thousand? Maybe? And how many out of that group care? Or know him?

That’s why it’s okay to be brave in this world. Because we’re not going to be here for long. It really doesn’t matter. I mean, things matter. I’m not a nihilist. But it’s okay to do ridiculous things and say asinine comments because there’s no need to be prisoners of other people’s eyes as they said in the Ab Fab courtroom scene.
Four paragraphs in and now I’m writing the end of an 80’s movie? Really, with the schmaltz? That’s the thing with my mind. I always have the junior high bully palling around somewhere in there. Keeping an eye out for sap or hubris or commonplace ideas that have already been stated thousands of times. Nothing new under the sun right?

The bully character can be perceived as bad but I think a big part of him is good actually. Without the editor and the critic it can devolve into drivel. I don’t know why I fight sitting down and writing so much. This reminds me of the time in college when I didn’t write my paper on time and so instead I wrote a small essay explaining why I hadn’t written my paper. That didn’t go over well.

College was fun. College was the best. Everyone was so focused on finding the best things to laugh at. Coming up with ridiculous, funny comments. And just getting really drunk. The drunk part was awesome, I felt, because it allowed us all to let our guards down and really get to know each other. I’m sure the sober kids knew each other well too but I’m pretty certain we had more fun. Sorry, but that’s kind of how it went.

There were people in college that spent their weekend nights holed up in the top floor of the library. What? Why would you do that? So their GPAs were between .0 and .7 points higher than mine ultimately. So what? Are those 6 extra bags of money when you’re 45 going to justify the fun you missed when you were 20? I don’t think so.
But hell, why should I have an axe to grind against those kids? If you have an axe to grind doesn’t that make for good comedy? I feel like in the past 5 or so years I’ve had something of an axe to grind against my peers who just went and did what everyone else did. Like my friend Eva at Case Western. She was 22 or 23 and said she wanted to get married so she could “get her life over with.” She was kidding, but not really. Get your life over with? Really?

It’s not that I have a beef with any particular life path. I just have an issue with the people that don’t put thought into why they choose a particular path. If you don’t think about your life and what it should be like you’ll just drift along and do whatever the majority does. But why is the majority doing what they’re doing? Maybe the majority is sick of the status quo, like what’s happening in Egypt. Maybe everyone else is just about fed up with things as they are but they haven’t reached the critical mass to do anything about it yet. So don’t do what they’re doing because it seems like the proper thing to do.

Sit down and think about shit intensely and drive yourself insane like I do. I don’t really drive myself insane. I like the Dave Eggers idea of having a mind that is constantly churning though. He wouldn’t have it any other way. Churning is the ideal state. Constantly pushing, revising, trying out new ideas, failing, re strategizing, re thinking, and then just drinking with your friends.

I like that I have a day job and do comedy at night. When I was in high school my grades went up when I started working on nights and weekends. I think you have to constantly be putting your mind through a wringer. Constantly show it new things. That’s why I get frustrated when people write off any particular medium. “I don’t watch TV.” What? You don’t take advantage of one of the clearest forms of communication we have available to us, a form of communication that is often elevated to art? Well, that sucks. Sorry to hear that. Any medium can provide new ideas, new information, new ways of thinking.

I’ve got these two new apps on my iPhone that I’m excited about. One is a collection of poetry where you spin a wheel and it puts together a hodgepodge of themes and poems around those themes. The other is an art application that has paintings and bios from great artists spanning different eras. I don’t know shit about art. And I don’t like schlepping up to the Upper East Side on weekends so I don’t spend as much time in museums as I should. But I can scroll through 50 Cezanne paintings any time I want now. That dude did not fuck around. Picasso said basically that he was the father of art or some shit like that. Who knew?

I’m really excited about where technology is headed. Phones are now just constant educational devices if you use them that way. That’s why I don’t download games on my phone. I like spending downtime reading or creating or let’s be honest just doing a great deal of drugs and staring ahead into space.