Q: What’s grosser than 99 dead babies in a pile?
A: One live baby at the bottom, trying to eat its way out.
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During a conversation with a friend some months ago, I realized that he and I had traded places in one critical way. We met back when I’d first started in standup, me wide-eyed and eager and hungry for gigs, he having a few years behind him already and established on the open mic scene. In the great bell curve of The Grind, I’d just begun my ascent, he was about to crest the peak. Easy to get along with, a dark sense of humor and quick to laugh, we became fast friends.
All these years later, he’s long since left standup behind, I keep one foot in the door. It isn’t standup where we’ve traded places. Again, when I began, I was excited and optimistic and happy about all the opportunities that were coming my way, whilst he was cynical and biting in the way most of us rookies become after a few years. More significantly, he was always angry, even when he wasn’t. It was always present, always felt, even when he was laughing and having a good time. Like a dusting of fresh snow covering a granite slab, you knew it was there, just under the surface, needing just a scratch to reveal it.
Today, though, with the grind firmly in the rearview, a new family established, and an annual consumption of cannabis that would make Snoop Dogg say, “Damn, he smokes a lot of weed,” the anger is gone. Whilst I am always angry, even when I’m not.
It sort of crept up on me. By the end of 2019 I’d been burning the candle at both ends for so long, I thought I could keep it up forever. A wee bit of a mental breakdown later, I knew I had to take a break, an exile that coincided with the start of the pandemic. Kismet, I guess? Exile included social media as well; by that point, for years, I would log onto Facebook several times a day and scroll and scroll, page after page, seeing everything and nothing, pausing only when a post interested me (which happened less and less often) or annoyed me (which happened more and more often). Whenever someone would tell me they hadn’t seen one of my posts, I was shocked. Why not, when I see everything?
In the first few weeks of exile, I had to fight the urge to log on, but it soon became more normal to not look than to look. It didn’t take long for me to notice how much better I felt about life. Slowly coming back into the world, though, meant getting back to social media, since it remains the only way for me to have some connection with standup. But I never got back into my old habit of doom scrolling.
That sounds better than it is. The reason I stopped scrolling page after page is that I found myself annoyed after a page or two. Even that escalated from being annoyed by posts from people I don’t particularly like, to posts from people I do like. I began to limit the time I spend there to only when I have something to post, like this blog, which really put the brakes on any content creation ambitions I may have harbored.
Mind you, I can still count on one hand the number of people who have seen me absolutely out of my mind with rage, and have fingers left over. I’m glad it’s a rare event. A few more have seen me close, but even that is extremely uncommon. Mostly, I’m often and too easily annoyed, which I do my best to cover. Holy shit though, people annoy the fuck out of me. When I am king, people who use their phones on speaker, in public, will be lined up against a wall and shot. Also, apparently I’ve become very sensitive to smell. People fucking stink. Thing is, as much as I want to be respectful of other cultures, if you smell someone who doesn’t use deodorant and/or treats perfume like marinade, chances are that person isn’t named Hampus Svensson. I’ve heard there’s a danger of becoming racist when you get old, I just didn’t imagine it would start with my nose.
It’s even affected my choice of music. In the past few years, I’ve gone from electronica to ambient, the musical equivalent of Ambien. Even at the gym, because, even there, I can be annoyed by other people. At this rate, by the end of 2025 I’ll use noise-cancelling headphones with no music at all, having gone from white people noise to just white noise.
My favorite Bill Burr joke about anger, he said his wife accused him of going from zero to hundred in an instant. “No,” he replied, “I idle at seventy.” I can relate.
A few years ago, bored and restless, I took an online test to see if I have ADHD. (As I’ve mentioned in the past, it would be nice to have a diagnosis, so when I act like an asshole I have something to blame other than the fact that I can be an asshole sometimes.) The test was comprised of several statements that you would strongly disagree to strongly agree with, on a scale of 1 – 10. According to the result, I likely have ADHD, because I strongly agreed with the statement, “I delay or avoid doing tasks that bore me.” Now, I’ve heard that Adderall is amazing for increasing focus, but getting bored by boring shit… that’s a sign of mental illness? Wouldn’t it actually be sick to get excited by boring shit?
On that note, while I would love to be all Zen and not sweat the small stuff and let all that negativity just flow over and past me like water, maaan, I’ve decided to not beat myself up when I get pissed by someone who acts like a cunt. To regulate the anger to be relative to the situation, not to eliminate it completely. I’m still a nice guy, one I think others would describe as patient, even if there’s an edge there that wasn’t before. Honestly, I kind of like that edge; at work, for example, since it’s a service job, I meet the odd asshole now and then. Before, I would just listen and nod and take whatever bullshit they’d throw at me, now I have zero patience for it, have even chased a few people away from our counter. My co-worker who is six months older than my daughter and, boy, that isn’t fucking weird at all, told me recently, with pride, that I’ve become “sassy.”
Hopefully it’s something I can draw on for material. My favorite jokes to perform have always been rantish in nature. Just have to remember to throw in a punchline here and there.
While I’m at peace with anger, it’s important for me to control my temper as well. However, I’ve found that it expresses itself in unexpected ways. Stick a finger in a hole in the dam, the water pops out someplace else.
Back in college, some friends and I rented a VHS from Tower Records, a sentence that John Mulaney would describe as very old-fashioned. We’d chosen Witchboard, a horror film about a non-trademarked Ouiji board that unleashes a demon, but, opening the cover back at the dorm, we found that the store clerk had put the wrong tape in the sleeve. We had Body Parts, starring Jeff Fahey. Well, it was still horror, so what the hell, pun intended.
The movie, as I remember, stars Fahey as a man who loses an arm in an accident but, as luck would have it, this means he’s eligible to be one of the first recipients of a donor arm, thanks to a medical breakthrough. The transplant a success, he’s able to enjoy a normal life with his wife and young son. Turns out, though, that the donor wasn’t so willing. He was a convicted murderer in jail who had several body parts harvested from him, without his consent. He breaks out of jail and goes on a hunt to get his missing parts back.
That isn’t all to the story, however. Another aspect is that evil doesn’t live only in the brain, but also in the flesh. Fahey learns this in a scene that comes so completely out of nowhere that we were shocked, pissed ourselves laughing, and rewound the scene over and over again. He’s in his living room, roughhousing with his five-year-old son, everyone’s laughing and having a good time, and then he backhands his kid so hard he flies across the room and into a wall.
There have been times when I’ve been kidding around with people, even my wife and my kid, and my joke goes for blood. I don’t bring a knife to a gunfight, I bring a knife to a pillow fight. It’s not my intention, but it is my instinct. I still get too easily annoyed by posts on social media, but I’ve even felt schadenfreude when bad things happen to people I like. As I wrote in the last post, when my friends weren’t as outraged as me about the flame message, I got angry at them, despite knowing, even in thick of it, I would feel just as dismissive as them within a few days, a week at most. Not happy about this, I can tell you.
Since there are these reactions I can’t control, it makes it that much more critical that I control what I can. Feeling anger doesn’t mean having to live in it. A few years ago, we got a new neighbor, one who is clearly mentally ill. While he should deserve some compassion, in theory, in reality this led him to screaming at young and old women, destroying property, even stealing Christmas decorations. Little could be proven, however, and with my wife on the condo board, we were made acutely aware of how hard it is to pursue a formal action against someone like that. When he finally moved away a few months ago, the board (sans my wife) literally threw a garden party to celebrate.
I did not attend. I was happy he was gone, sure. I’d yelled at him a few times over the years, even once more after he moved away, when he still wanted to park his bike in our yard for some mongo reason. But to celebrate his moving away? I don’t know, feels like tempting karma in some way.
I consider this when I thnk of revenge. This guy that sent me the flame message, he pissed me off. He chased me away from a club. He discourged me from performing more often. He won. It makes me think of Chris Rock, though, talking about when OJ Simpson was found not guilty and Black people said, “We won, we won!”
“What the fuck did we win?” Rock asked. This guy got his revenge, sure, but did that get him more spots? Did it make him more well-liked? Did it make him funnier? (See, I was nice there, and asked if it made him funnier instead of funny.)
I mentioned his obviously purchased Instagram followers not as a jab (well, not only as a jab) but because I seriously considered pursuing that. Flagging his account as spam so that Insta takes a look and deletes the account for violating the terms and conditions. For his money and effort to get thrown away. And what would that accomplish, only than a brief feeling of dark joy?
Plus, I need to dial down my annoyance at shit that really doesn’t matter. For example, last year, a famous American comic, in town to perform at a theater, decided to pop by an open mic and do a spot. This being a guy with a TV series and several movies under his belt, obviously the club owner was over the moon, posting lots of pics. He wasn’t the only one; other comics there that night were thrilled to post selfies with that Hollywood star. Just one, teensy little problem- during metoo, a woman accused him of raping her multiple times over a weekend in her own bedroom, including violating her with a glass bottle. No charges came of that. He did face charges, though, after calling in a bomb threat as revenge on a woman who’d rejected his advances. Not to mention the fact that his behavior on his TV show got him fired.
When I saw those posts, I found this extremely irritating, even now as I write this. The selfies from all those female comics who had pushed to make clubs safe spaces, with giant smiles on their faces and his arm around their waists. Makes me want to put the club on blast and write a big diatribe here about hypocrisy in standup and… for what? The majority of you dear readers are in standup also. Is the news that hypocrisy exists in the community going to blow your fucking minds? Of course not. As much as I believe in taking a stand, what, exactly, would I be making a stand about? This has nothing to do with my life, so it’s not worth spending any energy on it. And yet, here I am.
By the way, those federal charges over the bomb threat got dropped because the government decided he was brain damaged. This is why I’m a comic. Life is often hilarious. So, just as it’s okay to have gay feelings as long as you don’t act on them, I’ve decided it’s okay to be angry long as I don’t act on it.
