Don't Shit Where You Eat! ™

My wife said she wanted me to take her someplace she’s never been.

So I said, “How about the kitchen, you fucking whore?!”
– Henny Youngman Kinison (National Lampoon Magazine joke)

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Ah, the corporate gig.  An opportunity for a comic to get paid to say the same dick jokes we tell for free multiple times a week.  An opportunity to bomb, since you were booked by the one person interested in comedy, to perform for a large group of people who couldn’t care less.  But, you know, money.

I was once offered a wedding gig through a fellow comic, a Swede.  A friend of his was getting married and their guests were international, so they wanted a comic who could perform in English.  Said Swedish comic didn’t feel confident enough in his own English ability to handle it himself, so he asked me if I was interested.  Certainly I was interested in money I mean an artistic performance.

Mind you, I didn’t know the happy couple at all.  We bounced a few messages back and forth online, they gave me a general idea of what they were looking for, and we made plans to meet up for coffee.  Not surprisingly, this kept getting bumped and rescheduled and never actually happened, as they were far too busy with wedding planning to bother with me.

When the day came, I arrived at the venue- a lovely locale near a lake in Stockholm- and waited outside until it was my turn.  The groom was Swedish, the bride was Eastern European, and I listened as letters were read in Swedish and then again in English so that everyone could understand.

Finally, it was my turn.  I stood along one side of the horseshoe-arranged tables, the wedding pair sitting well off to my right.  It was my first time seeing them at all and they looked nice and happy.  I don’t remember my set, just that I kept it family friendly and ended with a corny line I stole from the speech my best man gave at my first wedding.

Afterwards, I went back outside and was quickly caught up to by a member of the wedding party, who happily asked me to stick around until the couple could come out to thank me.  It wasn’t long before they did so, smiling ear to ear.  The groom was a skinny giant; standing close to me while we talked, I had to bend my neck nearly ninety degrees backward to keep eye contact.

I didn’t have that problem talking with the bride.  If anything, I had the opposite problem.  I didn’t notice anything when I first saw them for the first time, seated at the table; perhaps she’d been sitting on a booster seat.  She was a little person, the top of her head barely reaching her new husband’s waist.  Sweet, though, and happy with my set, so I was happy as well.

As I left the venue, I thanked my lucky stars that I hadn’t met them before the wedding, because I knew that all I would’ve been able to come up with would be inappropriate jokes at their (her) expense.  In fact, I then proceeded to do just that.  I can’t remember them now, only that one was vicious and one was something about them saving money on the honeymoon flight since he could stuff her in the overhead compartment.  Of course I would go on and tell these jokes several times over the coming weeks, as part of my set at various clubs.  

A few months later, it was time for the Fall season premiere of my club, Crossfire.  It looked to be a good night, we actually had a crowd, which was far from the norm.  I hosted, as usual, and I got as far as, “This summer, I was asked to perform at wedding…” before locking eyes with the bride, sitting at a table across the room, her legs dangling off the floor.

Now, being the professional that I am, I quickly recovered.  “… and I’m not gonna talk about that tonight.”

Julius Caesar walks into a bar and orders a martinus.
“Don’t you mean martini?”
“If I wanted a double I would’ve said so.”
————–


The people who founded Rome looked no different than hundreds of other wandering tribes in Europe at the time, nomadic hunter-gatherers led by a chieftain. The area in which they’d decided to settle, however, was fertile, easily defensible, and strategically located for trade. The people thrived, the camp grew into a village, then into a city. The chieftain became a king, the population grew to the point a senate had to be established to represent the will of the people, and to handle administration.

However, the king still held absolute power. Like any other monarchy in history, there were good kings and there were bad kings, but there really is no such thing as a good king. A benevolent tyrant is still a tyrant, and a bad king is even worse.

During the reign of a particularly bad king, a group of senators formed a conspiracy. There should be no more kings, Rome should be a government of the people, by the people, for the people. Sounds noble, but since the Senate allegedly represented the people, what they were really saying was, a king shouldn’t be in charge, the Senate should rule. They hatched a plan to assassinate the king. One of the conspirators was a senator named Brutus.

Their plan succeeded. The corpse of the king still warm, they swore a sacred oath: from that point on, there would never be another king in Rome. If anyone ever threatened to become one, it was the duty of the Senate to murder that person just as coldly as the last king.

The Republic would continue to be stable for over four hundred years from that point. Then came a true crisis: Julius Caesar. He was immensely popular with the people, the Senate was not. The common man viewed the Senate as corrupt and bogged down with bureaucracy. Caesar used his popularity and strength to chip away at the system of checks and balances long established by the Senate to prevent anyone from achieving absolute power, until he had become king in all but name only.

A group of senators, having reached their breaking point, formed a conspiracy. They remembered their oath, their responsibility. Caesar had to die, and in a spectacular fashion, to send a message to any other would-be tyrants. One of these conspirators was a senator named Brutus, a direct descendant of the man of the same name who had killed the last king of Rome, because history is fucking cool.

Their plan succeeded and on a day in March, Caesar died alone in a pool of his own blood on the Senate floor, having suffered dozens of stab wounds. Ironically, by trying to save the Republic, the conspirators had doomed it. Caesar’s murder would lead to two civil wars. Caesar would not become king, but his adopted son Octavian would become Emperor, and Emperors would continue to rule for the next and final four hundred years of the empire.

Anyway, no idea why Rome is so much on my mind lately. Perhaps it’s because we’re approaching the Ides of March.

A Roman walks into a clothing store and asks, “Do you have XL togas?”

The clerk replies, “Sure, but why do you need so many?”
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Rome was an interesting place back in the day. An absolute powerhouse, you would’ve found people in the city from all corners of the empire, with different languages, cultures, and religions, yet religious conflict was rare. A Greek would’ve said that Zeus was the king of all gods, while a Roman would say it was Jupiter, but since they spoke different languages, they figured they may actually be worshipping the same deity.

Well, the Jews weren’t going for that. They made a point to tell everyone there weren’t many gods, there was one God, and He was theirs. Romans may have been in control, but what did Earth matter when the Jews would enjoy riches in Heaven? All the things that Romans felt were blessing from the gods- money and sex being huge perks- those things were sins. God wanted everyone to be meek and powerless and poor. By an amazing coincidence, those were the exact things the Jews felt under Roman control.

Jews were quick to add that it didn’t matter if anyone agreed with them or not, because it wasn’t possible to become Jewish, it was their birthright. Romans would’ve rolled their eyes. Jews gonna Jew.

Just before the birth of Christ, the Republic fell. Caesar had been assassinated before he could name himself king, which led to a civil war and the rise of Octavian as Augustus, first Emperor of Rome. They were at the peak of their power and the empire would continue to expand significantly, but in many ways, it was the beginning of the fall of Rome.

Right as things began to go to shit, Jesus was born, preached, and was killed. His followers were Jews, but their religion was Christianity, Jewish 2.0. All the same tenets, but now anyone could join. Not only that, it was your duty as a Christian to get as many to convert as possible, and to constantly go against the mainstream. If you sneezed and someone said, “Jupiter bless you,” you had to correct them. “Actually, it’s ‘God bless you’.” (I didn’t make that up, that literally happened often. Can you imagine anything more fucking annoying?)

So, when things were falling apart, the Romans began to wonder why. Had their gods forsaken them? Or was something else to blame? Hmm… everywhere they looked, there were poor Brown people who didn’t speak the language, refused to assimilate to Roman ways, to even respect the culture. Not like us…

It’s said that Emperor Nero fiddled while Rome burned. That probably didn’t happen, is likely just anti-Nero propaganda spread by Christians. What did happen is, needing someone to blame for the Great Fire, he accused Christians, leading to one of many pogroms against them and many deaths.

Christians won out eventually, since nothing could stop the fall of the empire. As the divide between the haves and the have-nots grew into a chasm, it was much easier to find converts. Hey, you’ve got nothing anyway, might as well follow a god who says that’s a virtue.

What I love most about history is that it stubbornly refuses to repeat itself. No one would ever blame the “other” ever again.

Tryna strike a chord and it’s probably A-Minor.
Goddamn if that isn’t the best joke I’ve heard in a long time.
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I am aware that what the rest of the world calls American football, we, as Americans, call football. What the rest of the world calls football, we call soccer. I will do the same because I’m American. Not in the fuck-you-I’m-American sense, but that this is the language I speak. Yes, the British call soccer football, but I also would never ring my solicitor or put u’s in words where they don’t beloung.

Of all the things Swedes could be critical of, the only thing about America that they consistently give me shit over is soccer and football. “You should call it hand-egg!” they say with glee, thinking no one ever thought of that before. Another chesnut is, “There’s only eighteen minutes of action in a three-hour long NFL game!” True, but you know what the key word is there? Action. My Lord, I’ll take that over watching a ninety minute soccer match any time.

To be fair, I’ll take that over watching baseball, too. And basketball. And tennis. And any other sport, because I am not a sports guy. I could not give less of a shit about sports, which makes expecting me to be a big defender of football even more ridiculous. Sports bore the living fuck out of me. However, I have seen many sports live and had a great, fun time, every time. Except one time, when I had amazing seats at a soccer match and I was equally bored to tears. I guess what I’m trying to say is, fuck soccer.

And fuck everyone who says, “Oh, they’re such pussies, wearing all that armor!” The quarterback is built like a muscular stick and there are eleven guys on the opposing team, each built like a dumptruck, hoping to slam into him so hard the ball flies out of his hands and his teeth from his head. I think we can excuse the padding, especially considering the average soccer player will fall to the ground and writhe with pain if the wind changes direction.

The only reason I developed even a passing (no pun intended) interest in football is Tom Brady. I was living outside Boston when he took over as QB for the Patriots midseason. I remember him being asked in his first press conference if he thought the Pats had any chance at all of making the playoffs and he said, “We’ll have to win every game left on the schedule for that to happen,” and then they won every game. This was so unexpected, their stadium had been scheduled for demolition before the season was over, and had to be postponed. I watched them defeat the LA Raiders in a home game, at night, in the snow, and it remains the greatest game I’ve ever seen.

Turns out, cheating and taking advantage of every possible loophole had a lot to do with their success, but why would I care about that?

Well, you’d never catch me watching any football game other than the Super Bowl, but I’ve made an effort to see that every year. Not so easy, considering the fact that I live six hours ahead of the East US Coast. After Brady left the Pats, what little interest I had in football waned, and last year, four days into a new job, I made the executive decision to not stay up until the wee hours watching TV. This year, securely employed, I figured, why not?

My interest was piqued this time thanks to the Philadelphia Eagles. Growing up in South Jersey, the Eagles should’ve been my team, but I wanted them to lose because Philadelphia fans are the fucking worst. I knew they’d riot if the Eagles lost and riot if the Eagles won, and guess what happened this year? Fun facts about Philly fans (and people in general):
– Santa made a special appearance during an Eagles game one year. Fans threw ice balls at him.
– Fans have thrown C and D batteries at opposing teams and referees.
– The Beastie Boys participated in Lollapalooza one year and MCA brought a gaggle of Tibetan monks to bless the stage at the start of the day. Attendees were given free bottles of water because it was so hot. I think you can guess the rest here.
– Also, the Beastie Boys put a basketball hoop on stage and made shots now and then during their performance. This basketball hoop was stolen by the end of the night.
– HitchBot, the hitchhiking robot that successfully navigated across several countries, did not get past an alley in Philadelphia.

Boston Red Sox fans are a close second to Philly as far as horrible people are concerned, and I was always torn about the prospects of that team. Again, these are fans who riot no matter the outcome. Ultimately, I was happy when the Sox finally won a World Series, because a major aspect of their identity – that they were cursed and could never win – was taken from them. Now they were just yet another team.

While I went into this Super Bowl hoping the Eagles would lose, that feeling was destroyed in minutes. The last Super Bowl I’d watched, a lot of people criticized it as boring, because each team’s defense was so strong. Kansas City just got humiliated by the Eagles, over and over again.

But I couldn’t tell you who I felt worse for, Kansas City, or the Hollywood celebrities who showed up to be part of the pregame and introduce the teams. It reeked of desperation, actors begging to stay relevant in a country where populism has swung so hard to the right (indeed, King Trump was even in attendance, the first sitting US president to do so). I likely feel worst for Drake, that poor Canadian. Bad enough that the crowd at the Grammys sang along to Not Like Us, this time an entire arena roared the A-Minor line.

What’s the difference between a JAP (Jewish American Princess) and a WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Princess)?

A WASP’s boobs are real and the jewelry fake.
——————

It’s said that, if you could travel from and back to Earth at the speed of light for a matter of minutes, you’d find that days, weeks, months, possibly years had passed since you left. I thought of this after gigging at Maffia Comedy for the first time since November. Hardly an eternity, yet the regulars spoke to me as if I was returning after a long retirement.

Things move fast and not at all in standup. Faces change, material doesn’t. I’ve often said that going to an open mic for the first time in months reminds me of going to my gym in January. Suddenly, I see lots of new faces, most of whom I’ll see a few more times before never again.

I’ve never really taken a break. Well, I suppose I did during the early days of covid. Well well, not even in the early days. I still performed until it felt wrong to be in a club completely shirking the rules while restrictions (well, again, recommendations) got tougher and the crowds dwindled. There have been summer trips to the US when I didn’t perform for a month or more, but that was more due to lack of opportunity and/or lack of ambition to seek opportunities.

There hasn’t been a time that I made a conscious decision to take an extended break. I know others who have, and the anecdotal evidence seems to point to this being only positive, but it’s not me. While the Grind may be firmly behind me, I still have ambition enough to want to get out there as often as I can.

I thought I’d be rusty after so much time away from the stage, but I didn’t feel particularly out of practice. I’m not sure why that is; I can only guess it’s due to performing regularly in the meantime. Not on stage, but in my head, alone in my apartment, in the shower, in a car. I still get ideas and there’s lots I want to work out, but not many opportunities to do so.

On the bright side, performing for an imaginary audience means the material always kills. It can’t compare, though, to the feeling of it working in real life. I’m not sure what I enjoy more, when a new joke works right out of the gate, or when it works after testing multiple versions. I don’t even mind having to accept that a new joke will never be as funny to an audience as it is for me. Sometimes, you have to kill your darlings.

Maybe it isn’t something new and I’m just more aware of it now, but I feel like my set has become more me-centered. I’ve always been very, likely too, concerned about focusing on Sweden, partly out of a desire to be more universal, mostly because I don’t want my Swedish peers to dismiss me as just another boring expat comic (which they’ll do anyway, so I really shouldn’t bother worrying about them). My latest sets have been: I’ve lived in Sweden for 19 years, I perform in English, I’m a dad, I’m 50, I hurt my back recently, I work at the airport, Trump. Me me me me me politics.

I feel like I’m discovering a new path through the woods, a new shortcut along a route I’ve traveled for years. Joking about my dad, about getting older, I feel the crowd laughing more because they relate, instead of laughing at me making fun of them for being Swedes. I’m being more universal by focusing on me.

The punchline being, the crowd laughing because they know exactly how I feel, this means I’m not special.

I didn’t know Princess Diana had dandruff….

…. until they found her head and shoulders on the dashboard.

————————————–


A highlight of last year that I failed to mention was being invited to take part on a debate podcast. Invitations like those have always been rare, and I always appreciate them. However, for me, this would be more of a “debate” as I had no intention, nor desire, to actually debate my opponent.

A Swedish podcast, I was faced against a Trump supporter. Well, Trump fan is more accurate as, being Swedish, there was little in the way of actual support he could provide, not even a vote, so even there a debate felt pointless. As if being a Swedish Trump fan wasn’t rare enough, he is also a Christian Evangelical, a true unicorn on these shores. Being someone who believes in an omnipotent being who loves us unconditionally, who gave us free will to accept that love, who will send us to burn in Hell for eternity should we decide to not accept that unconditional love… what was I going to do, appeal to his reason? As long as Trump is anti-abortion and pushes for Israel to have full ownership of the Promised Land, leading to Armageddon and the Second Coming, Evangelicals will overlook everything else about him.

Being as it was a debate I had no interest in winning, I’m sure I lost it. The guy came with notes. His gotcha question for me was, could I name something from Harris’s record I support? I had nothing, since I openly had no passion for her. In a debate against a Flat Earther I’d lose as well, because they have passionate beliefs, and I know what’s right.

At some point (ironically, it would turn out) I was asked about free speech rights on social media, and I said I agreed that everyone should be able to say whatever they want, but free speech isn’t consequence-free speech. The latter, though, is what people are usually whining that they don’t have, saying cancel culture comes for you when you speak your mind. The point is, you can speak your mind. That’s your right. I have the right to walk the streets of Harlem, screaming the N-word. And when I get punched in the face, that’s the consequence.

Anyway, at some point on the podcast, I referred to myself as a blatte. Blatte is not a nice word, but it’s one I have a particular interest in. That word refers to an immigrant, skin a shade of brown, or “non-European.” Okay, technically I’m not a blatte, but Swedes don’t even think of me as an immigrant, or invandrare in Swedish. An incident forever burned into my psyche was talking to my then wife’s well-to-do cousin a few months after moving here, telling him I was taking the government-provided Swedish courses, or Swedish for Invandrare, only for him to reply, “Oh, don’t ever call yourself invandrare. You are not invandrare.”

I knew immediately what he meant. I’m white. English is my first language. I’m not one of them immigrants. I’m an ex-pat.

One of co-workers is an Afghan who spent a few years living in Greece before moving to Sweden. We talked about the difference between immigrant and ex-pat. He is brown, living in a predominately white country, he is an immigrant. I am white, I am an ex-pat. Okay, he asked, what if I moved to Dubai, to be a white person in a predominately brown country? Oh, I replied, then I would… still be an ex-pat, because I am white. Look, I don’t make the rules, I just enjoy the benefits.

I’ve always been hyperaware of the gulf between Swedes and immigrants, long before I ever started performing, and it’s always been a burning topic for me, on stage and off. I call myself a blatte because no one in Sweden would ever look at me and think that, they wouldn’t even look at me and think the word immigrant. I am, though, and my wife is a blattelover.

As it would turn out, YouTube demonetized the video of the podcast, thanks, at least in part, to me saying blatte. One of the guys who runs the pod was very annoyed by this, because, when you’re an artist, your chief motivation behind creating content is so that commercials can be attached. Ahem. Nah, in all seriousness, I get it. Making a living by creating content certainly seems a more attractive way to make a living than, say, being fifty and renting out cars.

That said, I can’t say I’m shedding much of a tear over it, at least not as an advocate of free speech. Social media give us platforms to reach hundreds, thousands, potentially millions of people, and it costs us no money at all. We do pay, of course, but with our personal information. I heard Zuckerberg on Joe Rogan’s podcast (or at least maybe forty-five minutes before I turned it off out of boredom, which is more often the case than not these days), and several times Rogan, a champion of free speech, said that social media should give people the ability to post anonymously, only for Zuckerberg to not respond at all. Why would they do that? The whole point is to get all our data, to then sell to advertisers.

Rogan thinks these social media companies should provide their services for free. Rogan, who said recently that the McCarthy Era wasn’t so bad, since there actually were Communists in Hollywood. Seems to me that Comrade Rogan is a fucking pinko commie himself.

YouTube lets us post anything we want and doesn’t charge for it. There are rules, though, and breaking the rules has consequences. Imagine you invite me over to your house for dinner and you expect nothing from me for it but my company. Imagine that I walk inside and pull my dick out. You tell me to put that thing back in my pants, I scream, “Fuck you, you woke fascist! It’s a free country!” Imagine punching me in the face.

As a guest in your house, I would follow your rules. I wouldn’t complain about the quality of the food you’ve provided at no cost. I would offer to help clean up, hoping you’ll insist that I don’t need to lift a finger.

“I need eight hours of a sleep a day…. and about twelve at night.”
– Bill Hicks
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For a look back at the year that was, I can’t help but begin with a comparison to the year before that. 2023 was peak coming-back-into-the-world for me, standup-wise. I wasn’t grinding, the variety of clubs I performed at could hardly be called a variety, yet I still earned a substantial amount of money doing it. Certainly not as much as a professional comic and not enough to live on, just by itself, but as a professional hobby for someone living off a part-time gig as a game show host and also as a Swedish welfare moocher? It really helped to keep my head above water.

I started a full-time job in February 2024 and I felt like I all but stopped performing at that point, so I was surprised to find that, while my comedy income (in both senses of that term) did fall off dramatically over the year, my total wasn’t a big drop from 2023, mostly due to a lucrative first few months. I imagine, though, that 2025 will be significantly less.

Why am I starting with a talk about money, when I am someone who openly hates money matters? (Looking at my 2024 invoices this morning, I was embarrassed but not surprised by my sloppy bookkeeping.) Two reasons. One, to get it out of the way. Two, because, like the job as a game show host, which I continue to do, now that I have a full-time job and could easily live without the money from other sources, I enjoy them more.

It’s a reason I’ve never particularly wanted to pursue a life as a professional comic. Don’t get me wrong, if people would be willing to pay me a substantial and consistent amount of money to hear me talk about my penis, that would be pretty sweet. Even starting as a comic in my thirties, though, and with a family, that was no time to live month to month, gig to gig, and certainly not now when I’m fifty. I also don’t think standup should be a job. Jobs are jobs, fun is fun.

I think the biggest highlight of the year was being invited for two gigs I hadn’t asked for. GASTA up in Gävle is a fun, popular place for comics to chase, and opportunities are limited. I’d been a number of times, but the well dried up at some point, and eventually I quit chasing them. It was a nice surprise, then, to suddenly get asked to host a show there, which I hadn’t done there before, and also get paid for it, which was also a first. It was nice to be back after many, many years, and hopefully it won’t be as long again for the next offer.

The other was also a hosting gig, this time for an all-English show at the Västerås Comedy Festival, up and running for the first time after a hiatus. I performed at the debut festival there years ago and a few others as well. I’ve never had a bad time in that city and I’m always happy to go back. I attribute the gig offer to the club owner knowing me for many years, knowing that I am a very good host, and possibly (probably) because Jonathan Rollins wasn’t available, but I never look a gift horse in the mouth!

Towards the end of the year, I reflected here on my frustration about feeling a bit in limbo as far as performing goes. Not only was the list of venues available to me limited, I was going less and less. It was just as hard to see myself resuming the grind as it was quitting altogether. At this point, however, just as I’ve come to peace with being an angry old coot, I’m a peace with my current status.

Which is not to say that I want to keep things as they are. While I have been glad to focus on my job and crawling out of debt, I don’t want to make money my one and only priority. I’ve said for years that all I really wanted was a steady job I don’t have to care about. When I worked for Nintendo, my professional and personal life merged, making that a dream gig. Now, though, I’m far beyond the likelihood of finding a job that ignites my passion. I’m passionate about standup, I just need a boring 9-5 to live on.

Well, I finally got that job! To say I don’t care at all about it wouldn’t be accurate; I mean, I’m still trying to do my absolute best and I can’t help but voice my opinion about possible ways to improve the office, but I don’t have grand ambitions of advancement. In fact, I change to a shirt and tie at work, because I don’t want to bring anything home, not even clothes. At work I’m at work, when I’m off the clock I’m checked out in every way.

However, while this job is supposed to give me the opportunity to perform more often, to pursue my supposed passion for standup, it’s instead put a chokehold on me. Nights I have off I’m too happy to be home, rather than schlepp my way into Stockholm for a spot I may or may not get. I love being on stage, it’s just all the bullshit around it that makes it even less attractive to chase after.

I do intend to get out there more. I’d thought of taking all of January off, especially since observing Dry January makes it even less fun to be in a club, but I got myself a spot next weekend. Just have to find a balance between working and performing. Oh, and seeing my family.

Working at an airport, watching all the travelers come and go, I can’t help but see it as a metaphor of my life as a comic. Being mean to myself, I see that I stay right where I am and watch others leave me behind, soaring to heights I’ll never reach. To be fair, though, and to really stretch this metaphor beyond the breaking point, most of my fellow travelers never get off the ground, just wait for flights that are perpetually delayed or outright cancelled, until they eventually quit in frustration and never come back. Those few that do take off, most of them do a quick loop and end up right back at the same airport as me, to resume waiting for the next flight. And yes, there are those who crash and burn.

Q: What’s grosser than 99 dead babies in a pile?
A: One live baby at the bottom, trying to eat its way out.

——————


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.