UNREQUITED LOVE + DEATH DON’T MAKE GOOD BED FELLOWS

When you get to the point where you feel you were meant to be with someone, particularly after the devastation of divorce and they feel that way too, and then that doesn’t work out either, you find yourself fluctuating between despondency and being really angry.  Anger is safer than hurt.  It’s easier to feel.  The energy wants to get up and out of you.  It helps if you are a kick boxer.  Sadness is harder to feel.  It threatens to drown you and make you want to leave the earth.  It has been difficult for me on the planet.  I have had so many challenges and I hate that freaking word.  The only way to use anger wisely is to kick something, otherwise you get mad at things like words.

The person I fell for died.  First, you cry for six months.  Your life is suspended in the air while you have to grapple with an event so heavy such as death.  The other thing that happens when the person you love dies, is you have the luxury of pining over what could have been.  That will haunt you for a couple of years.  It’s also that splendid place in your mind where you can idealize how it would be for the two of you, now.  You will never know.  You also never got to see the person at 2AM sick with the flu or completely lose their temper.  You never see them grow listless from too much or too little responsibility, or say, forget the gym altogether or give up on their dreams.  As a result, you can immortalize their persona of how perfect they were as if frozen in time.  But of course, no one is perfect.  Perhaps this is why trying to get with someone post-divorce in your 40’s is difficult.  You have an unrealistic idea of what the perfect man is, to begin with.  It’s warped by time, by how it was when you were young.  Also the gene pool narrows and the only men that age well are gay and there is a statute of limitations for them too. 

Maybe you have a type.  Tall and stalky or tough or athletic.  The kind of guy who has a lot of knowledge about obscure shit with a motorcycle or a Republican who likes to scuba dive or the guy who has a trike who’s into art.  <--- actually I don’t think those last two go together.  You come up with a lot of qualifications that if the person lacks become deal breakers.  “Well, he asks weird questions like how was your weekend? and I won’t live like that,” you think to yourself.  The staggering disappointment of losing something that seemed completely impossible to get in the first place sets you back.  I’ve developed permanent armor as a result.

Friends are not helpful.  They say “well you just really need to get laid.” 

So then you take personal inventory.  I don’t want to be toiling away at my career any more is part of my latest thinking.  I should be in the Hamptons yelling at the help.  “Everyone knows living room curtains go to the floor.”  (idiot).  I want an oblivious workaholic husband who’s never home but has five cars.  I want the house to be so big that I busy myself decorating and preparing for house guests.  I’ll design menus in my fabulous Cole Haan bathing suit, poolside sipping bubbly rose out of crystal flutes with the most gorgeous gay men in New York.  This kind of fantasizing is exquisite if you don’t want to feel.

I was so burned by the real one in the past and not just my marriage.  I mean when your heart is sensitive and shit just goes wrong, you’re left to deal with the fallout.  Growing up there was a suicide attempt, a divorce, a remarriage, moving to an awful suburb with an alcoholic step monster.  But the now is re-traumatizing me.  My parents have passed and I’m divorced.   I’m left on my own with a 49-year-old sibling who is developmentally disabled.  I’m talking death, disease, divorce and disability.  This is going to be the name of my one man show.  Or should I call it the one man show with tits.  Naw, that's too crude.  I'll think a somethin'.

                                                                             

DEAD INSIDE/Rob the Mob

The only upside of getting sick is movie watching.  I seldom read when I’m ill.  Although I love reading, somehow when I have the flu or whatever, I afford myself the luxury of binge watching.  It is something I never do because my television isn’t hooked up and because I like to do creative things with my free time, oh ya and I’m weird.

At any rate, I watched this movie about a tough guy.  Tough guy is different than Bad boy.  I grew up in the 80’s where “bad boy” meant a metal or a rock guy with fucked up hair who drank & drugged.  Not my type.  I had rough boyfriends who always had weapons tucked away in various locations and had dubious ways of making money and dangerous friends, but never did I date a guy who listened to Metal.

In the movie, the guy gets out of prison.  His girlfriend picks him up.  They’re young-ish.  They get drunk, they have sex.  Next, he hashes out a heist.  They’re in love.  They’re in Queens.  They smoke a lot.  He gets a gun and they drive their giant Chevy Impala and act out their plan of holding up mafia social clubs in the neighborhood because he figures out that they have a lot of cash lying around these joints.

In act three, he looks at her and says “Florida is nice.  We should go there.  Marry me.”  This is the point of the movie where a girl tears up.  Me=nothing.  Nothing happened.  No moisture developed in either eye socket.  Doesn’t matter if you’re a broad from Boston or not.  There’s nothing like when a man softens enough to say that.  And these were great actors.  I mean they nailed this scene.  He is brutally handsome and the camera loves his face.  She is unconventionally pretty in a down to earth way.  She said yes.  I should have been balling.

But, nothing.  Am I dead inside ?

I had this marriage that ended badly.  I’ve learned over time, you can’t hold on to how you wish things could be.  (I used to have a line in my act, “I just want to go to my gay boyfriend’s house, listen to Peggy Lee and cry over what could have been.”  These days I'm less fag hag, more John Goodman.

Now that I’m older I see how you can’t long for the you that was lost in that time period, that elusive "you" that you can’t get back.  BUT, I’m also stuck.  I’m not dating.  It’s like I’m blocked.  Like a giant black box is covering my heart completely. 

I can’t help feeling there is something missing.  As if there is some seed within me that hasn’t been cooked yet that needs time before I am ready, really ready, to address the black box.  I sort of hate personal growth, gurus and motivational speakers.  I hate shrinks, I hate mediation and I hate the notion that we all need “fixing.”  Shrinks I hate because at the end of a session you feel awful and then you go, “here’s a hundred bucks.” 

Maybe it’s exactly what I need though.  Life is nothing if it isn’t paradox.  

I used to cry at episodes of Mad About You.  That was the young me.  It was a really well written sitcom about a married couple where they respectively resolved all the dilemmas that plagued their lives in under twenty minutes.  Not really sure why that did it for me, but it did.  I didn’t even cry at Casablanca (because boo hoo he’s gonna die). <--- that makes me seem shallow and vacuous, but I think romance like that plain doesn’t exist.   

Maybe I’m not dead inside but the old self in me is dying.  Am I headed for a re-birth?

Unofficial Bridesmaid

I have a roommate who I call No Tits because she broke my balls from the jump when she first moved in (having fits over tablecloths, not having boundaries, criticizing my belongings and just generally being a rude entitled frizzy haired wench).  Surprisingly, someone moved in after her who was worse.  The new roommate who moved in, I refer to as the premenstrual-dysphoric-disorder-riddled-Jihadist-Macedonian-with-borderline (Jihad for short) has become extremely difficult to live with, thus has rendered No Tits and I, buddies.  (Jihad actually replaced the former roommate who was an obsessive-compulsive-anorexic-vegan-germaphobic-violinist-singer).  At any rate, the other day, the Jihadist and I had it out.  It was a short burst of an argument that escalated very quickly, ending with me calling her a twat.  I haven’t been that proud of moment in a while.  As a result, No Tits and I have a new found almost friendship, and subsequently I was subjected to a long-winded story about the pre-matrimonial celebration of some other bird, whom I imagine is also from Queens.  (how revolting).

No Tits informed me that she would be partaking in her best friend’s wedding as an “unofficial bridesmaid.”  It is not clear why she was given the less than desirable title of an un-thing.  I suspect that the bride had too many candidates to choose from and did not want to create a hierarchy or pit members of the would-be bridal party against each other.  It’s as if she is saying, “the matching dress thing I can do without, but I still need someone to do all the pre-wedding party stuff, so we’ll have to call her something pretty close to bridesmaid.”  So, No Tits doesn’t get a real title.  She does all the work without the glory. 

Bridesmaids usually are kind of strange looking with their weird taffeta dresses and goofy up-do’s.  I often wonder what happens to them, because you know what they say; once a bridesmaid . . . . she’ll probably get an abortion and move to Reno . . .(and I imagine she goes on to live a sad, loveless life as an alcoholic residing in some small town with an old powder blue Chevy Malibu on blocks in the front yard, sad and forgotten about, like the love she'd always wished she were pretty enough to know). 

No Tits planned the engagement party, the bridal shower and the bachelorette party.  Lack of being blessed well endowed aside, she is doing a service to her friend out of love and she informed me that the other bitches are chiming in, because they don’t like her having a position of power (however unofficial it may be).  They drop comments.  They dis her planning.  They walked out of one event because it wasn’t open bar, leaving No Tits with a $300 alcohol tab, which she paid.  Proper etiquette dictates that the family of the bride should host the shower.  According to Emily Post, “it is not within the responsibilities of the bridal shower to do so, although they can if they want.”   Also, I’m pretty sure the maid of honor shouldn’t be doing all three events i.e. everything. 

Because of the mother’s absence, the other fraulines should have stepped up.  Instead they criticized the almost bridesmaid who is handling all three events.  Poor No Tits.  I can’t believe I am feeling compassion for someone who caused me much grief in the beginning of our relationship.  She is grinning and bearing it for her friend.  No Tits is a bigger person than me, because I wouldn’t have lasted through the first half of the not open bar engagement party as an unofficial bridesmaid.  I’da been all “I don’t think so sluts.”  Not because of lack of booze, but because these people have no class.     

The problem with this unofficial bridal party is that every female should be working together to pick up the slack to make the celebration happen, where the mother clearly has dropped the ball.  But instead, they are being outright rude and entitled.  Maybe they’re pissed they weren’t bridesmaids. 

I got all this information in the kitchen, which is where N.T. and I usually converse.  At the end of her story, she divulged that she will be wearing a very low cut dress for the bachelorette party, but that it didn’t matter because she has no tits.  Life does take strange twists and turns, but I honestly found my way around from really not getting along with this roommate, whom admittedly, I gave a terrible nickname, to cheering her on in her battle over the senseless gaggle of nit-picking hens.

reference:  emilypost.com/book/emily-posts-wedding-etiquette/

RANT TO A DEAD GUY

I don’t know why I’m feeling like this because you’re dead and you’ve been dead, but I’m still here on the planet and its sucks because something is wrong with me because I don’t want a boyfriend I question whether my sexuality is in flux and although women are far superior beings the bad news is I’m straight but I don’t like anyone even a little prob cuz everybody over forty is a catastrophe they say things like “cool beans” which was never hip and sometimes they have small beings that fell out of some other woman’s vatootle that hover around them who according to their Tinder profile are “their life” well your “life” smells like he soiled his trousers I can’t believe everything I’m writing to you so that you will read it from wherever you are (how strange) even though you were from the Bronx I’m very confident you went straight to heaven we met at Nicks in Boston my home club  I just thought you were so good on stage and you were covering for a comic who incidentally was in my wedding (WHAT) ya it’s weird and then you didn’t say you didn’t drink but after your set that’s what we all do in Boston, I did ask you if you’d go out with the gang and you said something that resembled a “naw” and your girlfriend walked up but it was really weird because we connected later anyway through Myspace (ridickballs)  Myspace? feels like centuries ago but you said hey next time you’re in New York, hit me up and I think you texted something about going to the Cellar I got really excited because my comedy career was in a holding pattern at best and New York was on my radar (to keep with the aviator themed analogy) I was just waiting to get enough money to move we hung out it was great I totes didn’t like you like you, I just thought it was cool to have a new comedy friend one time we went to the Strip.  After my divorce moving back to Boston was weird because the scene was younger douche-bro’s who started after me and not the guys that I knew from waitressing & from being around the clubs in the 90’s a New York friend was more than welcomed and I swear I didn’t like you beyond friends but you asked about my life and if I had kids and about my parents and what was I doing with comedy and then we went to get Thai food then we went to HA where we waited around forever and then I bombed in front of 4 people – I ate it so HARD we eventually went to the Cellar and I thought your shoes were weird.  I didn’t really see anybody else because you were all I could see and you had the symbols for Om Mani Padme Hum tattooed on your bicep J.C. on the your forearm and we talked about one man shows and how all comics need to explore other avenues of expression and I always thought I would write one and you did a Moth and I wanted to be with you and I couldn’t eat and I told you about my noir fascination.  You hugged Geraldo who was surprisingly humble and such a cool guy and you had to drive me back to Valley Cottage because my 82 year old aunt was worried and had made me promise I’d get back no later than midnight and although you both were puzzled at my indulging her request, the three of us went up FDR Drive and he was frantically arguing with some broad on the phone who kept hanging up on him which was making him furiously mad and we all couldn’t help but to laugh because it was crazy. Months would go by and we didn’t talk and more months and your career got big and you were travelling and I don’t recall when I took a shine to you because we lived in different states, maybe it’s cuz you were funny, then you let me crash at your place when you were away so I could look for a job and I brought your mother raw honey that I got from Amish people I’m not sure she liked it because it was the kind that’s hard in consistency because there are no chemicals so you have to put the jar in boiling water and she was nice and your dog barked a lot but then he warmed up to me and it’s weird that night you called from a tv contest show you were on and said you were losing to a dishwasher which despite it being a slam against his heritage was very funny only because you were incensed that you didn’t win.  At your bedside there was a book about Buddhism with a prologue about Asoka Maura who I had written a paper about in an ethics class in college and I knew it was a sign I asked you how you could even do a television show and you said you just have to relax more time passed and we didn’t talk and I grew bitter and eventually gave up on you. I was really hurt and disappointed because I guess its because you made my heart feel so good and I couldn’t even remember having something to look forward to you finally did call but I was away then you were going to Boston and expected me to drop everything which I did you kissed me finally after 2 years and it was amaze nostrils because it was soft and unexpected and you were a gentlemen because we held hands.  The very last text you sent me said “I can’t wait to see you.”  How cruel the world is that it took you so young.  I got that text a couple of days before you passed.  I cried for six months which I know you know because the psychic told me it’s really hard to write about you because it makes me sad I don’t cry any more but it makes all the blood go to my face and I get weird and some moisture happens around my eye area it’s like a silent intense cry, but I pretty much am dead unless I’m performing or writing I guess I could say thank you which is weird but for the writing part?  I was so mad at you for dying but it’s not like you had anything to do with leaving your body and I know you didn’t end like completely but I still have good days and some bad ones I don’t cope well with feelings any more so for now and to end this rant all I got is om mani padme hum.

MID-40s PHENOMENON

Here’s what being in denial that you are in your forties is about.  I have an extreme aversion to the opposite sex and I have two unsuccessful half careers.  (I’m being dramatic) (and then there’s office gigs - Oh, the humanity!)  All this while I’m spiraling towards a narrow margin where people feel compelled to comment about my reproductive functionality, “well, you still have time to have a baby,” which is downright impolite, never mind implausible.

What is also happening is that I’m beginning to loosen the grip some.  Who knew?  Getting older has wisdom?  No kidding.  Trying to manage a creative career can be maddening.  I also just up and moved to New York City.  I always like to make things complicated.  My life consists of doing standup gigs, often travelling for them on the weekends.  I will do some writing and go do a set somewhere a couple of nights during the week.  At times, I also work an awful full-time job, so my schedule can be grueling.  I’m also a visual artist, but lately, I almost never have time and I currently have no studio to make art (the other half career).

I said to myself “for reals I’m out” which translates roughly to “I want to quit.”  Actually, I had arrived at this conclusion as a result of wanting to rid myself of worrying about money, and to live in a nicer apartment.  So I entertained the idea of letting go.  It’s not performing that is difficult.  The “grind” is working some job that takes up all of your energy, and then writing and performing anyway.

I emotionally gave up comedy because I wanted to see what it would feel like.  I wanted to just live life for a minute and avoid furiously trying to stay relevant.  What I noticed is work floods in.  When you’re not frantic and trying so hard, it puts you in the space to step aside and allow the universe to do its thing.  This new found detachment also allowed me to be freer on stage.   

I can’t really fool myself.  I’ll never give it up.  But in my false quitting, I noticed that finding contentment with exactly where you are has a lot of power.

It’s not evident whether my uterus will be all for naught.  I can’t seem to get the online dating thing to have significance, particularly because, gross.  But, perhaps when I am in the right state of mind, I will consider a relationship.   As far as my half careers go, I don’t really have an answer.  Writing, performing and making art are really just about doing it.  Living in New York makes me scoff at such liberties because it is so expensive.  I’m telling you, I was born in the wrong era.  I would have been perfectly happy being a mafia moll with a tommy gun.

More About Art+Comedy/ADD Rant & Lorna Doones

Blogging is perfect for women because we over-analyze everything.  I’m revisiting Carol Leifer’s book.  She’s had a great career in comedy. Which brings me to standup in general, and why we do it.  Recently, a friend asked me if comedy was something that I always knew that I would do.  I directly answered “no.”  I said that I originally wanted to be a successful painter.  I could always draw.  I majored in studio art in college.  I discovered that I was meant to paint when I was twenty years old and I did a semester in Italy.  After I graduated, I set out to try and become an artist.  I remember how daunting it was to have a job and then paint at night and weekends.  I enrolled part-time at Mass Art, because I was so petrified of it all.  Becoming an adult and trying to make it as an artist in an economy and social atmosphere that does not value artists was a tall order.  And the contrast was evident from my visit abroad where artists are respected and celebrated.   I burned out before I was thirty, due to the fact that I wasn’t selling a ton of art and I didn’t have a dealer that was representing me. 

I’m not entirely sure the answer I gave him is the most accurate.  I did get frustrated with art, but comedy was in my life from way back.  My father was a huge fan of comedy.  He loved Rodney Dangerfield, and of course, Carson, and he always had a list of street jokes available that he could share with his old buddies from Phili.  I used to listen to Spike Jones records and grew to become a huge Carlin fan, both by way of my dad.

If I had my way, and, left to my own devices, I would be in my art studio, rigorously making paintings with the kind of ferocity that comes from having a psychic space to create.  I loved how in the studio you make discoveries, you ruin paintings, and then you rediscover in another painting what you didn’t resolve in the first, and stuff like that.  In this hypothetical scenario, I would have a huge studio and no day job.  I would hide away and read shit like Susan Sontag’s Memoirs and Notebooks and then get drunk with other artists + writers and argue about the validity of Roy Litchenstein’s success.  What’s funny is there is not much difference with comics; just replace Litchenstein with Larry the Cable Guy.

But comedy is like being a painter.  You’re the creator.  I’m not singing Sondheim.  I’m the writer of the lyrics and the melody, and the performer. 

I would love to write for television.  That’s on my radar.  More writing in general might be the key to unlock my current state of feeling stuck.  And, my God, do I miss painting.  So much ADD today.  I had like 15 windows open in my browser.  I will list here all that I was trying to accomplish:

Create listing in TimeOutNY

Log in to stupid online payroll

Write this blog

look at Why My Cat Is Sad twitter page

I think I’m too tired to list the rest. 

It’s a boring list anyway.  More ADD i.e. on to the next thing (or things) such as:  1. Find Lorna Doone cookies; and 2. Tweet about someone’s demise and cats (and Lorna Doones).

Divorce, Rhino Bed, Pall Mall Smoking Cat

I totally wrote this blog and then went to re-open the document; I got that crazy sound effect the laptop makes when you've made a fatal error and it wouldn't open. So now I have to remember what exactly I was thinking about - or what I wrote at all. Do I start from scratch?   I guess I have to. The divorce part is easy; I got a divorce, The End. (condensed version).

The Rhino part - well, at the time, I wrote a lot of weird animal stuff. For a while it was kangaroos. They have 3 vaginas. (look it up). They can be perpetually pregnant like a Catholic. It's amazing. Then it was pterodactyls. (see tweets below)

went to the store for peacock gloves and jarred pterodactyl queefs. found neither.

going to cryogenically mutate my uterus to house a small pterodactyl that I get from 

the future or maybe I'll just go to the store.

But the rhino part of the blog/part of my life was derived out of having to sleep on an inflatable bed that was enormous and when fully inflated you could bounce a rhinoceros off of it. PAM !

Divorce/Rhino/Pall Malls Part I

You get a divorce and then you have to start over. It's cool dawg. So you figure out how to go about life sleeping alone. There's a lot more to it than that but that's the jump-off. As a comic you'd think it'd be a great source of things to write about, but really, you have all this rage.

It's funny, you'd think it would be about your struggles to cook for one, or what to do with your time since you're not nagging or cleaning up after someone. But no. It's a death. So the first thing you face is failure. Everything that was in your psyche, your way of looking at the world is done. No big, you're just devastated. And then your friends/colleagues chime in, "you'll meet someone" or "you weren't happy anyway."

You begin to write all this angry material about those people. You think to yourself "what are they talking about anyway... I'm not looking to meet someone - I hate everyone, including them. Why would I be on the market to do it all over again?"

So then you move in with gay guys that cheer you up just because of who they are. Like, when they are ironing in the kitchen in their underwear, listening to Aliyah. They understand you the way a mother would. "You're fine girl, a fresh start is what's happening and you'll come out stronger in the end." You cook together and watch American Idol and things start to smooth out a little.

So you start to write some other stuff that's less angry, more funny. I began a steady track of getting on stage a lot. I drove out to weird parts of New England to do fundraisers to very receptive audiences. My vibration started to rise some. I became the house emcee and Nick's Comedy Stop in Boston. More progress and momentum.

I worked doing odd jobs. I house painted. I took care of my friend's chain-smoking mother, helping her with housework, driving her to the doctor and to get scratch tickets.

Eventually I wanted to really buckle down and get ready to move to New York. I had no savings, so I moved into my girlfriend's house in Saugus and worked a full-time job, while working as a comic every weekend. It was me, her and the cat. The cat meowed frequently and sounded like she smoked 4 packs of Pall Malls a day. The futon in Saugus was not good, so I borrowed my friend's gigantic, inflatable bed (yep, another inflatable bed) and dreamed of rhinos bouncing off of it.  I'm always going to wonder if the original Divorce/Rhino/Pall Mall Smoking cat was funnier, but I posted this, nonetheless.