Becoming Philogelos

The vast majority of my life has been spent obsessing over details that only I can see. I’m constantly chasing ideas that fill my head full of wonder and I let them get away from me so as to court grandiose visions of things I have no discipline to accomplish, if it were in fact the case that such dreams could ever be achieved in any way other than in figments of the imagination. At times, my mind moves so quickly that I could never put my thoughts into words, even if I had three mouths, one of which was dedicated to drinking espresso all day.

In my youth, I was slight of frame, always scared and yearning for the approval of others, even if it got me in trouble. I’ve since grown, but rather than do a complete overhaul of the cracks in my foundation, I’ve just patched over them with thousands of hours of rehearsed responses, so as to present the illusion that I’m a fully functional, confident, charismatic personality. When people that are close to me attempt to dig deeper, I become offhand and quickly turn the conversation around to a point where they can talk about themselves—a trick which works very well in our society. After a moment, they forgot they’d inquired into my life at all, like it never happened, and I feel safe again.

I’m not sure what agoraphobia is, and knowing that I’ll follow a mind puzzle to the ends of the earth until I’ve contracted every mental disease in the DSM-IV, I haven’t bothered to look it up. Very superficially, I know it has something to do with a fear of the outside world, and when I’m home I have it, and when I’m out, I have the exact opposite fear. Fear of the inside, and of going home, and of being alone again, because when I’m amongst conversation, I watch every word like I’m seeing the first aliens to land on earth.

I soak in conversations from the periphery, cataloging everything that’s said like a 12-year old reading baseball card statistics, and when I see things moving in a direction where I can contribute, I’ll look around the circle until I see someone who’s making eye contact with everyone—that person is my way in. When the anticipation is too great, I’ll wait for them to start speaking and engage them further with my eyes, and when their turn in ceded, I’ll respond to them as if I’d been there the whole time.

Within a few minutes time, I’m making everyone laugh and remember stories that relate to the subject matter, and I’ll find ones of my own to contribute.

And they’ll laugh

And I’ll laugh

And I’ll be completely in my element, laughing and making jokes, and I’m never happier than when I’m doing that, which makes me wonder why I was so scared to go outside in the first place.

I’ll go around from circle to circle, repeating the same process, sometimes bringing with me a person or two from other circles, until the whole thing is one big mash-up and everybody’s listening. Then I’ll plant seeds and see which ones make purchase and which ones die away. I’ll watch garden flourish and fall, and walk through new ones that spring up.

Then

Maybe

Just maybe

I’ll see the perfect opportunity

I’ll see a point in the conversation where everyone is listening, where everyone so wants a discussion to continue that they’re practically biting their bottom lips waiting for someone to do it. That's when I hear the sweetest sound in the world...

A pause

It’s only a fraction of a second, and if you weren’t someone who was so obsessed with the timing of the thing, you would never in a million years be able to spot it, but for me, it’s the one thing I’ve been waiting for the whole night.

This is when I jump in to tell an anectdote. An anectdote so funny and so engaging that I’m the only one speaking for a whole minute, and at the end of that minute, comes the punchline. The big reveal that creates an upheaval of laughter. Then, five seconds later, comes another one.

And another

And another

And another

Some other jolly fellow, somewhat like me, throws in something else funny as a set-up, and I take the bait. They laugh even louder. My mind begins to move faster and faster, like when I’m at home dreaming up impossible scenarios. I begin to improvise with everything everyone has been talking about all evening, weaving together the fabric of the conversations and wrapping up the loopholes into more laughs and more laughs. At some point, it begins to be like sex. Two bodies, mine and the party’s, working tirelessly toward a common urge, an itch that needs so badly to be scratched.

A quip

A chuckle, which I follow with

A zinger which garners

A guffaw, and I continue into

A set-up, then

A silence...

An anticipation…then…

Bang!

A big release of everyone laughing and bending over and slapping shoulders and covering mouths and laughing at how hard they’re laughing and how ridiculous it all is and what a great time they’re having. I look around the room at crinkled eyes and turn my face in a funny way, ever so slightly, which sends them off again. I can barely talk because I’m laughing so hard, which makes all of them laugh, in turn.

It’s there, riding the laughgasm, where I achieve the dreams that rattled around in my head all day. It’s at that point that I’m untouchable, that I’m at my absolute best.

If there’s a feeling better than that, then I have yet to discover it. I look for it in every single interaction I have. I hint at it with cashiers in the grocery store, I coax it out of curmudgeons at the bus stop, I bait it from colleagues and acquaintances.

They say a sign of addiction is that once you start doing a drug, you’ll continue to do it until you physically can’t consume any more of it. I’m entirely too familiar with that mindset. I’ve gone broke just going out—not to drink, necessarily, though I usually have a beer or two or three—just to be out around people. If they were all eating sushi, completely stone sober, and the opportunity to make people laugh is on the table, I’ll eat sushi with them until I’ve stretched my pennies to their furthest point, just to chase a laugh.

It’s probably the only addiction in the world that people encourage you to indulge in against your best interests, and I’m only happy to oblige my enablers.

That’s why I do what I do.

That’s why I’m a comedian.

This is the story of how I became that way.

This is the story about how I became a laugh addict.  

A Page from History

Clipping From A NM Newspaper concerning the death of Skunky Precious

The world was shocked more than 100 years ago over the death of country music legend Skunky Precious. This is a headline from The Sheeitfire Post, based our of New Mexico, which covered the incident. Apparently Precious had been experimenting with livestock, and things went terribly awry. Anyway, this is a tribute to a great man who made some great music.

On The Subject of Music

The funny thing about music is, there’s always someone waiting in wings to blow the fucking pants off of everybody. All the time there are music critics that say that there’s nowhere else for music to go, that it’s all been done, that nobody is ever going to top the bands of yesteryear. Then invariably, inevitably they’re proved wrong in the worst way.

 "Get your ass off that couch and

get a real job, hippie."

 Right now, probably working at a McDonalds flipping burgers, there’s a 16-year old kid whose manager is giving him shit. Chances are, he’s a little bit high. He doesn’t show up to school on time, he’s got kind of a messy home life and he enjoys some unusual hobbies, one of which is assembling and disassembling his uncle’s guitars to see how they work.

When his shift is over at 10 p.m., he hops on the bus, destined for the half-double downtown where he lives. The whole trip, he taps his foot and nods his head to a tune that hasn’t been heard by anyone except for his pet snake and his little sister through the floorboards. His left hand compulsively mimic the chords of his creation, while the old black lady next to him curls her face slightly, thinking he’s got a twitch.

When he gets home, he doesn’t hear his parents arguing. They’re probably at the bar. His sister is over at a friend’s house and the neighbors got evicted yesterday for delinquency. This affords him one of those few rare moment t where he can dispense with the headphones that he usually has to plug into his amp and let his music roam the nooks and crannies of his house, without the backlash that would typically accompany a session of that nature.

He tosses his work shirt on the bed and unsheathes his guitar from its usual place in the closet. He knows to keep it under a sheet, because the last time his old man was hard up for drinking money, it ended up at the pawn shop. He had to work for two whole weeks to get it back. A measly $200 was all the shop owner wanted for it. Had he known what he was holding was a Frankenstein guitar monster from hell, he would have charged more. If he had a crystal ball, he would have given dear old dad enough money to drink himself to death.

After some slight tuning, McDonald’s least favorite employee goes to work on his instrument like an ant farm disassembling a dead bird, his fingers methodically finding each and every one of the chords that have been running through his head all day, with only the blips of the cash register to accompany them. It’s like calculus with tones, runs and arpeggios, but even though the complexity of what he’s playing rivals that of the most skilled violinists, somehow the end result is something accessible to the human ear—that diamond in the ruff of chaos that everybody never knew they always wanted to hear.

The notes bounce off of every surface of his room from a worn-out Jackson 5 poster to a stack of oft-flipped Chopin sheet music. In a perfect moment between musician and musical instrument, his guitar becomes part of his hand and the nexus between his thoughts and actions encounter no resistance in between. He is affectively talking with his axe, and the dialog is so good, Winston Churchill or T.S. Elliot couldn’t have said it better.

There's big dreams and little means. Minor frustrations and big considerations. There's Lies about Love and hums about humanity and riffs about romance, all mixed together in a beautiful mess that pulls at the heartstrings while everything's left of the frets. Inexplicable sensations and Good Vibrations and soulful creations are all dissected, analyzed and rearranged with mastery to get a better of idea of that little unreachable explanation of humanity that's taken every author in history millions of pages to get their finger on, without ever reaching it, like one of Zeno's Paradoxes. The hamster on the wheel that toils with everything he's got to reach a conclusion that is, by its very defining characteristics, asymptotic in nature...    

When he’s done, there is a long, silent pause as he brings himself back into the present. There’s a noise, but due to the intensity what just happened, he fails to recognize it right away.

Someone is pounding on his front door.

He tosses the guitar back in his closet and descends the steps, which are being bathed in a blue and white strobe. Through the peep hole, he sees a police officer, and he takes a second to straiten his hair a little before opening the door. When he does open the door, the cop on the other side has his eyebrow raised, slightly.

“Yeah?”

“We got a noise complaint about twenty minutes ago that someone was playing some pretty loud music in this house.”

“Oh…uh, that…that was me…I’m sorry. I was just practicing.”

“Yeah…well, keep it down, alright, kid.”

“Oh, yes sir. I didn’t mean—“

“It’s alright, but it’s after ten, so you can’t play that loudly.”

“Okay, I won’t. I’m sorry--”

“Again, it’s fine. Just keep it down.”

“I will, officer.”

“Good…by the way…”

“Yeah?”

“That was pretty awesome.”

“Oh, thanks.”

“Yeah…well…goodnight.”

“Okay, ‘night.”

“Yeah…”

And that’s him.

That’s the kid that one day is going to rock your ass inside out in the best way. For all you know, you ate one of his burgers or sat next to him on the bus. Eric Clapton was a busker in West London after he got kicked out of art school. Any one of the thousands of people that passed by him would be paying hundreds of dollars to hear what they tossed a shilling in a guitar case for in 1961.

So long story short

Don’t complain too much if they forget to hold the onions on your McDouble. The kid’s got bigger fish to fry.

McFish, to be precise, along with twenty pounds of ass kickin’ solo, contained within a five pound bag.