I like to euphemise my failure sometimes. Is that healthy? Not sure, but it gets me through the funk. Instead of seeing a 3-year fallow period as idleness run amok, why can’t I just say I was in a minimalist phase with my intelligence, talent and productivity? Like the artists. I mean that kind of stuff looks really good on a gallery plaque next to the etchings of a disturbed painter. Why not me?

Some of the voices in my head sound almost exactly alike. It’s eerie. And it’s so easy to get confused. I think one reason I do quit is because I get confused. I listen to the voice in my head that sounds friendly and protective but is really the voice that makes me disappear from everything I love when it starts to get difficult.

One very valid reason for quitting was having to work night shifts at various jobs to make ends meet.

One semi-valid reason for quitting was that I wanted to take time out to find out why I was such a jerk. I can’t say I’ve made much headway in that respect. And I’m still a jerk. Maybe that’s just the way it is. Zen.

“All reasons are unconscious. “

— Keith Nietzche or Ted Jung?

“I think I should just film me going around life thinking about comedy and what keeps going wrong.”

–Actual Journal Entry, c. 2015

I’m scared of fame. Also, of finding out how shit I am at everything. I’d rather guess.

The war on words thing —an external factor in the case of my personal downfall

The Bandwagon Mantra Conundrum got to me. Don’t say this. Gotta’ talk about that. Be relevant. Say what everyone expects. Make sure to let them know what side of the law you’re on. Bye the t-shirt. Fly the flag. Blaaaaah. There’s a lot of that guiding artistic expression these days and something about it I find extremely stifling. In fact, I think it stifled my own expression a few years back (see excuses). I got sick of preaching to the choir and dancing around the land mines of language as if words were ticking time bombs. Unfortunately, I didn’t have enough boldness or faith in my own perspective to trust that what I had to say was okay, even if it didn’t appeal to everyone. I wanted to please everyone. Ha. Impossible. Impossible. Impossible in comedy. You can’t occupy every spot on the spectrum of relevance and acceptance. Impossible.

At one point, I became convinced I had to quit comedy because I was a backwards bigoted imposter that was hiding the truth from myself and everybody else. I was (mostly) wrong. It turns out I just found “ISTS” really annoying most of the time. And I found most ISTS to be of equal annoyingness to one other. Sorry, Everybody Decent and Wonderful. And, yes, I do support Everybody Decent and Wonderful on the planet, whoever that may be. But it’s complicated. And it mostly comes down to language for me. I believe in evolution and I believe language, with all its complexities and shit, is a fantastic marker of evolution. Language is human. It’s ours. And it’s meant to be used and played with. We need to use it and play with it in order to let it evolve. But people are becoming, it seems, increasingly scared of language. They’re terrified of it. And for good reason (see crazed Earth monkeys flinging shit at one other). Language can be very powerful. It can oppress or liberate. It can condemn or embrace. And there are truly people out there who want to use language to negative ends. But that’s not a reason to crack down on words and topics. It’s not a reason to sort words and topics into “acceptable” or “unacceptable” in an attempt to silence what we don’t want to hear. And it’s not going to work anyway. We can’t cut the lexicon in half. We can’t cave to insipidness. We can’t allow the erosion of expression, even if that expression is sometimes extremely painful to behold (see Donald Trump’s speeches and Justin Bieber singing in Spanish)*. It’s worse when it’s curtailed, codified or refined without that happening through an actual gain in awareness and understanding. What goes underground simply festers (see shock upset election 2016, Brexit, etc.).

Anyway, I guess what I think I’ve learned is that you can love people, share their interests and want to fight for those interests, but you have to do it in your way and with your own words. That doesn’t mean you have to be a dick, by the way. In fact, please don’t be a dick. We have enough of them. And they don’t know how to laugh at themselves, which is one of the hallmarks of being a dick, but not of evolution. Another hallmark of being an unevolved dick is having no inner compass whatsoever. Most of us, I like to think, have some kind of compass inside of us that directs us to good places if we let it. Use your compass. Trust your compass. Unless you happen to have a broke-ass compass. Then get it fixed and get it working. We need the truly compassed now more than ever. What we don’t need is a bigger choir of robotic uniformity. Express. Ruffle feathers. But do it from a place of love. And do it with your compass. Without a COMPASS, there’s no COMPASSION. Yes, I went there.

DISCLAIMER: The author of this post recognizes and acknowledges that the gross vagueness of the post creates immense room for misinterpretation. But she’s pretty lazy and not good with concrete examples. So, to make it slightly clearer to the reader:

Please no kudos from Nazis, racists of any sort, sexists, ageists, elitists, apologists, perfectionists, sadists, etc. (notice I only put the bad ones in) I’m just a broken comic trying to figure shit out. None of this was code for “Let’s get the Commie Jews.” Okay, thanks.

*Imagine Donald Trump singing “Despacito”.